true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

More documents

Recommendations

Info

true hallucinations.htm me. Alchemical gold was ever flowing through my fingers; I was certain that if I could alloy it with hope and imagination it would not pass away. I saw that there is an interphase between consciousness active in the world and consciousness active in the central nervous system, whose intermediary is the body. That interphase is language. To use language, consciousness informs the brain to inform the body to impart coherency to the random motion of the air molecules near but outside the body. This coherency is supplied by consciousness in the form of a word. None of the physical laws operating on the air molecules have been violated, because the coherent pattern of behavior of the molecules is due to an input of energy—an input of energy whose release was initiated by an act of conscious will. Will is not an item in the toolkit of scientific explanation. Language is thereby seen to be a kind of parapsychological ability since it involves action at a distance and telekinesis, albeit voice-transduced. Perhaps under the influence of psilocybin an immense energizing of will could be vocally transduced into the world where it might do more than imprint a signal onto the random motion of air molecules. Perhaps instead a word, visibly beheld, might be transduced and appear through appropriate shifts of refraction in those same nearby air molecules. Normal speech itself is sometimes seen to effect the refractive index of the air in front of the speaker's mouth. Viewed in profile a speaker is sometimes seen to generate a wavering of the air in front of the mouth that is like the shimmer of a mirage above a hot highway. Perhaps this is an indication of the hidden potential of speech to go beyond its normal function of symbolizing reality to actually signifying it. A more perfect Logos would seem to be the result— a Logos able to regulate the activity of the ego as it exists in the sum total of individuals living at any time. It is like a god; it is the human god. It is something that will happen to human destiny sometime in the future, and because it will happen, it is happening. Nothing is unannounced. The ontological mode of the higher dimensions into which humanity is being propelled is being anticipated by the singularity that we call the wholly Other or the alien. The alien is teaching something through its reinforcement schedule: It is preparing us to confront the God facet of ourselves that our explorations into the nature of life and matter are about to reveal. Such was the table talk of our distressed band of adventurers. How long ago our arrival at La Chorrera then seemed! CHAPTER FIFTEEN A SAUCER FULL OF SECRETS In which we plan our departure, I encounter a flying saucer, and theories sprout like mushrooms as we return to Berkeley. The ELEVENTH OF MARCH was a full moon. It passed uneventfully enough after the adventure of Dennis and the mission bell, meaning that I can now recollect little of what happened. I remained ecstatic, certain that all was for the best, certain that some definitive tipping of the hand by the thing we were dealing with was about to occur. The next day, in the late afternoon, Ev walked out from the river house to see me. She invited me to return with her to the river and for all of us to have dinner together. She showed the strain of what we had all been going through. There was no doubt that whatever had happened was pushing us to the limit of what we could assimilate without wanting to move against it. As we walked back across the pasture, the atmosphere seemed to be even more alive and active than usual, with spawning clouds and drifting mist. Ev pointed to the southeast, where a black, stratocumulus mass was seething and boiling up to great altitudes. We watched for a few moments, and it became like a vast mushroom cloud—the aftermath of a thermonuclear blast. The impression was very startling, and Ev recalled to me Dennis's words with regard to Stropharia cubensis. He said that it was the mushroom at the end of history. To him the shape of the atomic cloud was a physical and biophysical pun on the transformative powers of the Strophariad and its eruption into human history. As we watched, suddenly Ev gasped. From the seething base of the cloud what looked like a column of light emerged. The column was sustained, not merely a bolt of lightning. It was hard to see how it could be a shaft of sunlight, since it was late afternoon and the sun was in the west, while the cloud was in the southeast. We watched it for perhaps a minute. Then it stopped abruptly. Ev was quite shaken. Even more than the frozen appearance of the river, this occurrence was of an empirical order different than anything that she had experienced at La file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/All%20Users/Doc...lture/True%20Hallucinations/true%20hallucinations.htm (70 of 106)4/14/2004 10:01:15 PM
true hallucinations.htm Chorrera. Arriving at the riverside campfire we learned that Vanessa had been up at the mission with Father Jose Maria talking on the radio to the bush pilot who had whisked Dave from our midst. The pilot was willing to follow Vanessa's intent and think of us as a low-grade emergency. He promised to return in a few days to fly us out. I was unhappy with these arrangements. I knew that we, the gringo strangers, would lose face with the local people when our need for this airlift became known. Also, I did not have Vanessa's faith that all Dennis needed to return to normal was to check into the world of modern psychiatry. But there was nothing to be done for it, and so we dined in silence, each lost in unshared thoughts. The next day we were to pack all our equipment and move it to the river in preparation for a flight that could come unannounced at any time. Already we were preparing to withdraw from the vortex at La Chorrera. The evening's only moment of humor was provided by Ev's animated description of Dennis evading Vanessa's wardenship and slipping away from the river house sometime during the previous night to go and sit quietly in the house of some Colombian colonistas, who awoke to find him there as unassuming as a piece of furniture. As the story died away, the unspoken dimensions of it returned to move in each of our minds. The next day was March 13. The camp in the forest, the hallowed-seeming spot where the transforming experiment had occurred, was dismantled. All the artifacts that set it apart from dozens of other Witoto huts were tucked away, and it was returned to its native anonymity. Outside, in a pile, we left quite a cargo trove behind us, for our forced evacuation by airplane left precious little room for any gear; some insect and plant specimens would leave with us, the cameras, the notebooks on the experiment—that was it. The things that we left would be swiftly assimilated by the tolerant Witotos who owned the site of our attempted probe of hyper-space. We were all installed in the river house ready to go with the airplane whenever it should appear. Everything seemed to be moving forward of its own accord. We swam in the river and sat on the rocks, scanning the sky and listening for the drone of the little amphibian. Thus the afternoon passed, with even Dennis quiet after an episode in the early morning in which he had methodically thrown the contents of his room out the window to the point of ripping out the window frame and hurling it after everything else. Around four o'clock, I was lying on the river bank about twenty feet back from the river's edge. I was thinking about a walk to the river I had taken two days before, when each step nearer the water seemed to bring more rhyme and rhythm into my thoughts. From out of nowhere I remembered an old Celtic saying that Robert Graves discusses: "Poetry is made at the edge of running water." My recent experience at water's edge had something to do with that, I believed, and I was pondering it. Vanessa and Ev were washing in front of me at the river bank. Directly across the river from us was the southeastern sky in which Ev and I had seen the cloud with the shaft of light just twenty-four hours earlier. I was gazing in that direction when I noticed what I thought was the weak beginning of a rainbow, a place low in the sky near the horizon where there seemed to be the faint touch of a spectrum. After a few seconds, I called down to the two women and asked if they saw a rainbow across the river. They glanced across the river for only a moment and said that they saw nothing. I did not persist, but instead watched the sky in that spot. By this time, I had stopped forcing my opinions on people. I was already regarded as nuts, not incoherent exactly, but not to be trusted or relied upon because I believed such odd things. That was my flaw. I kept watching across the river and I saw the thing intensify. I became extraordinarily interested. In this pastoral setting, it seemed to me that a great revelation was brewing. I watched and I saw the colors deepen; the bow of a rainbow never formed, but the deepening of the colors in one spot was very definite. Again I inquired of the women if they saw the rainbow across the river. Again the light glance. And? Wonderful! "Yes, we see it. Not much of one is it?" The clue-scanning part of my hyperactive imagination was upon this detail in an instant. Yes, first a cloud with a shaft of light; now a spot of spectrogrammatic color in the same spot in the sky. I had the strong sense of the eye-in-the-sky drawing close to my thoughts and watching with satisfaction as I understood the importance of the southeast, and of watching and focusing my attention on that spot. In my mind, the teacher said, "This is the place. This is the sign. Watch here." file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/All%20Users/Doc...lture/True%20Hallucinations/true%20hallucinations.htm (71 of 106)4/14/2004 10:01:15 PM
Page 1 and 2:
true hallucinations.htm 'The Copern
Page 3 and 4:
true hallucinations.htm "Around us,
Page 5 and 6:
true hallucinations.htm Dennis McKe
Page 7 and 8:
true hallucinations.htm PREFACE SOM
Page 9 and 10:
true hallucinations.htm mills of To
Page 11 and 12:
true hallucinations.htm DMT drug, a
Page 13 and 14:
true hallucinations.htm monologues
Page 15 and 16:
true hallucinations.htm We made our
Page 17 and 18:
true hallucinations.htm "Reluctant
Page 19 and 20: true hallucinations.htm Puerto Legu
Page 21 and 22: true hallucinations.htm time, we le
Page 23 and 24: true hallucinations.htm Iridescent,
Page 25 and 26: true hallucinations.htm should go,
Page 27 and 28: true hallucinations.htm Basilio ins
Page 29 and 30: true hallucinations.htm which was a
Page 31 and 32: true hallucinations.htm In which a
Page 33 and 34: true hallucinations.htm a particula
Page 35 and 36: true hallucinations.htm CHAPTER SEV
Page 37 and 38: true hallucinations.htm from taking
Page 39 and 40: true hallucinations.htm the body, m
Page 41 and 42: true hallucinations.htm CHAPTER EIG
Page 43 and 44: true hallucinations.htm completely
Page 45 and 46: true hallucinations.htm the same si
Page 47 and 48: true hallucinations.htm That aftern
Page 49 and 50: true hallucinations.htm occur in th
Page 51 and 52: true hallucinations.htm and whose a
Page 53 and 54: true hallucinations.htm on a stage,
Page 55 and 56: true hallucinations.htm I felt beat
Page 57 and 58: true hallucinations.htm CHAPTER TWE
Page 59 and 60: true hallucinations.htm Dennis was
Page 61 and 62: true hallucinations.htm These ancie
Page 63 and 64: true hallucinations.htm the same se
Page 65 and 66: true hallucinations.htm certain tha
Page 67 and 68: true hallucinations.htm in on harmi
Page 69: true hallucinations.htm From the vi
Page 73 and 74: true hallucinations.htm question is
Page 75 and 76: true hallucinations.htm proposition
Page 77 and 78: true hallucinations.htm When not re
Page 79 and 80: true hallucinations.htm "Share my p
Page 81 and 82: true hallucinations.htm nowhere and
Page 83 and 84: true hallucinations.htm Once we wer
Page 85 and 86: true hallucinations.htm Breakfast w
Page 87 and 88: true hallucinations.htm have betray
Page 89 and 90: true hallucinations.htm is illumina
Page 91 and 92: true hallucinations.htm maximum ing
Page 93 and 94: true hallucinations.htm Ev and I ha
Page 95 and 96: true hallucinations.htm be obvious:
Page 97 and 98: true hallucinations.htm level. Our
Page 99 and 100: true hallucinations.htm above her w
Page 101 and 102: true hallucinations.htm made their
Page 103 and 104: true hallucinations.htm ---------.
Page 105 and 106: true hallucinations.htm ---------.
show all

true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?