true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
Dennis was on his best behavior. Beyond his commenting as we got aboard that an airplane was a partial condensation of a flying saucer, he
said little. A roar of the engine, a hard pull back on the stick, and we and our legendary bush pilot were airborne. We circled the mission once
before settling down to follow the Rio Igara-Parana back to the Rio Putumayo and the version of civilization that the town of Leticia would
afford. What a tiny world La Chorrera is, left behind in the trackless jungle after only a glimpse of buildings and Zebu cattle resting in the
green pastures, looking like lumps of melting, vanilla ice cream. I imagined that whatever we had touched and been touched by, it was now
falling behind us.
We stayed two days in Leticia, days in which Dennis showed marked improvement while the rest of us drifted into various stances of distance
with regard to each other. This seemed to be compensation for the excessive intimacy our isolated expedition had made necessary. The oddest
thing about Leticia was that we were hardly off the plane before we ran into Jack and Ruby, an American couple who had rented Ev's
apartment in Bogota for a few weeks. I had thought the name combination weird when I met them six weeks before, and now the fact that they
were practically awaiting us in Leticia heightened the strangeness. I could not quite get my mind around it.
By the time we reached Bogota, Dennis had almost completely returned to normal, lending weight to the idea that some form of temporary
chemical imbalance had been responsible for his reaction rather than the emergence of a chronically unbalanced personality structure. He was
very shaky and very bummed by any mention of fourth-dimensional superconducting bonds, ayahuasca, or shamanism. He said, "Look, I have
had it." He had, too.
He was nearly normal, but I was just at the beginning of a years-long period of unusual ideation—the state of suspended disbelief that gave
birth to the ideas concerning time set out in The Invisible Landscape.
On the twentieth of March, there was general agreement that Dennis was totally back with us. It was an occasion of great happiness and we
celebrated at one of Bogota's finest restaurants. It was an immense accomplishment to have been able to allow the reversal to work itself out
without the aggravating influence of modern mental health care procedures. The ordeal in the wilderness that all shamans must face had been
endured. A step on the path to knowledge had been taken.
On March 21, I made a journal entry—the first in weeks and the only one that I was able to make for another couple of months. I said this:
March 21, 1971
It is now seventeen days since March fourth and the concretizing of the ampersand. If I have more or less correctly understood this
phenomenon, then tomorrow, the eighteenth day, will mark some sort of half-way point in this experience. I predict that tomorrow Dennis will
return to the psychological set he experienced prior to March first, though it is possible that rather than a residual amnesia concerning events
at La Chorrera he will have instead a growing understanding of the experiment of which he was the creator. The past weeks have been
harrowing and seemingly made of so many times, places, and minds that a rational chronicle has been impossible. Only Finnegans Wake gives
some idea of the reality of the paradoxicum as we experienced it by virtue of being able to pierce beyond time's double face. In spite of earlier
misunderstandings and mis-projections concerning the cycles of time and number operating within the phenomenon, I now believe that in
these seventeen days we have experienced, albeit sometimes running backwards and certainly enormously condensed, enough of a full cycle
to begin to foresee in some dim sense the events of the next twenty or so days and have some idea of the approximate nature and direction of
the opus.
This journal entry makes clear that while Dennis was recovering from his submergence in the titanic struggle I was quite in the grip of a
struggle of my own. I was caught up in an obsessive immersion, almost an enforced meditation, on the nature of time. The ordinary concerns
of ordinary life ceased to matter to me. My attention was entirely claimed by my efforts to build a new model of what time really is.
Resonances, recurrences, and the idea that events were interference patterns caused by other events temporally and causally distant claimed
my attention. In those early speculations I imagined a mythic cycle needing forty days to be brought to completion. It was only later, when I
began to be impressed with the DNA-related and calendrical nature of the temporal cycles, that I turned my attention to cycles of sixty-four
days duration. This speculation eventually led me to turn to the / Ching. In those early notions of a forty-day cycle of alchemical redemption
there is only the slightest hint of the eventual theory in its operational details; yet the intent is clearly the same. Resonances, interference
patterns, and fractal regresses of times within times—these were the materials that I began to build with. Eventually, after some years of work,
the result would have a certain elegance. However, that elegance was reserved for the future; the early conception was crude, self-referential,
and idiosyncratic. It was only my faith that it could be made coherent and rational to others that kept me at it for those several years,
transforming the original intuition into a set of formal
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