true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
question is asked of UFOs and tables and chairs? No one else saw this thing as far as I know. I alone was its observer. I believe that had there
been other observers, they would have seen
essentially what I have reported, but as for "real," who can say? I saw this thing go from being a bit of cloud to being a rivet-studded aircraft
of some kind. Was it more true to itself as cloud or aircraft? Was it a hallucination? Against my testimony can be put my admitted lack of
sleep and our involvement with psychedelic plants. Yet curiously this last point can be interpreted in my favor. I am familiar through direct
experience with every known class of hallucinogen. What I saw that morning did not fall into any of the categories of hallucinated imagery I
am familiar with.
Yet also against my testimony is the inevitable incongruous detail that seems to render the whole incident absurd. It is that as the saucer
passed overhead, I saw it clearly enough to judge that it was identical with the UFO, with three half-spheres on its underside, that appears in
an infamous photo by George Adamski widely assumed to be a hoax. I had not closely followed the matter, but I accepted the expert opinion
that what Adamski had photographed was a rigged up end-cap of a Hoover vacuum cleaner. But I saw this same object in the sky above La
Chorrera. Was it a fact picked up as a boyhood UFO enthusiast? Something as easily picked out of my mind as other memories seem to have
been? My stereotyped, but already debunked, notion of a UFO suddenly appears in the sky. By appearing in a form that casts doubt on itself, it
achieves a more complete cognitive dissonance than if its seeming alienness were completely convincing.
It was, if you ask me—and there is no one else really that one can ask—either a holographic mirage of a technical perfection impossible on
earth today or it was the manifestation of something which in that instance chose to begin as mist and end as machine, but which could have
appeared in any form, a manifestation of a humorous something's omniscient control over the world of form and matter.
It was not a mirage of the conventional sort. Years later it occurs to me that perhaps it was a kind of mirage still unknown to us—a temporal
mirage. The ordinary mirage is an inverted image of water or a distant place. The cause is the distortion of light by alternate levels of hot and
cold air. Outside Benares, in India, I saw a triple image of the city suspended over the surface of the Ganges River. But a temporal mirage is
another matter; it is a lenticular image of
a distant time and place. Cause unknown. What makes the ordinary and temporal mirages members of the same class is that both types of
mirages require the intercession of the human mind in order to exist. Certain areas of the world have local conditions which make them mirage
prone; might the same be true of temporal mirages? Or perhaps the temporal mirage is a natural phenomenon, and the UFO is an artifact
resulting from the temporal mirage being used or experimented with by some future technology?
I believe that this latter comes close to the mark. The UFO is a reflection of a future event that promises humanity's eventual mastery over
time, space, and matter. We, in our clumsy attempt to probe these mysteries, were able to coax nature into throwing out this great, burning
scintilla of pure contradiction from the dark retort where she labors over the chemistry of the millennium. That we were able to do this is full
of import. It meant to me that we were on the right track; the Stropharia cubensis mushroom is a memory bank of galactic history. Alien, but
full of promise, it throws open a potential for understanding that will sweep away the petty concerns of earth and history-bound humanity.
At La Chorrera I had only the isolated personal conviction that our approach would be vindicated; now, as our ideas are finding a small
community that share these intuitions, I am yet more sure that the answer to all of the mysteries that disequilibrate our view of the world are to
be understood by looking within ourselves. When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward
toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within; the paths of the heart
lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.
The UFO encounter marked for me the culmination of our work at La Chorrera. My contact with the saucer took place at dawn on the
fourteenth of March. The following morning at eleven, March 15, the airplane arrived, unannounced but not unexpected. Vanessa had been
anticipating it for three days. It was a matter of a
few moments to clamber aboard after saying farewell to the priests and the police, all of whom had been most patient with our colorful party
and its unusual preoccupations. Only in visions had my eyes recently rested on stuff such as the little airplane was made of—the highly
polished, acrylic surfaces of machines and things impervious to hard, ultraviolet radiation; what the people of Amazonas call "machete skin."
It was a reminder of all that we were returning to.
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/All%20Users/Doc...lture/True%20Hallucinations/true%20hallucinations.htm (73 of 106)4/14/2004 10:01:15 PM