true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
propositions.
The end of March was mostly spent in Bogota, a dreary time. The urban frenzy of a teeming, modern city did not rest lightly on our junglesensitive
perceptions. Dennis seemed quite normal, though weakened and sobered. There were no messages from Dave, and Vanessa finally
returned to the States. On the twenty-ninth, Dennis followed her example and flew to Colorado. I insisted that Ev and I go to southern
Colombia so that I could have some time to reflect. This we did. I reviewed the whole incident at La Chorrera with no new insights and
concluded that some sort of psychic gravity was pulling us home. On the thirteenth of April, one day short of a month after my encounter with
the UFO, we arrived in Berkeley.
It was a short and difficult visit. I was beginning to see the dim outlines of what would become the / Ching time-wave theory. The
first maps of the / Ching hexagram hierarchy, which was eventually turned into a computer software program I called Timewave Zero, were
done at that time. I kept myself away from people. I was totally immersed in my work; I had no interest or patience for anything else. I was in
the grip of a creative mania more extreme than any I had thought possible. Each conversation with someone on these matters seemed to open
vast gulfs of misunderstanding.
The most grotesque of these incidents involved my effort to obtain feedback concerning our ideas from what I thought of as "real experts."
This misguided notion found me, one perfect day in May, inside the Donnor Laboratory of Virology and Bacteriology on the University of
California campus at Berkeley. Earlier I had made an appointment to see Dr. Gunther Stent, the world-class molecular geneticist and author of
the The Molecular Chemistry of the Gene. I didn't know at the time that Stent was a legend for his Scandinavian rectitude or that he fancied
himself quite the Renaissance man and social philosopher. A year or two later he would publish a book advocating a reform of global society
with the traditional social models of Samoa as an ideal goal.
I found the great man in his lab whites in a room filled with bubbling glassware and adoring grad students. I was shooed out of the lab, and an
underling ushered me into his private office looking west over the campus toward the Golden Gate Bridge miles away. From that ninth-floor
vantage point, the spring crop of students were reduced to ant-like scurryings on the greensward below. Gunther Stent joined me a few
minutes later.
Austere and balding, he settled back in his chair while I launched into the ideas behind the experiment at La Chorrera. I tried to begin gently,
but I was overawed and very nervous. After a few minutes, I sensed that he might be calculating the odds of whether I would physically attack
him. To his credit, he seemed to fight back this alarming swarm of thoughts, allowing me to ramble on and on. His face became utterly
impassive as I became more and more uncertain of the direction in which the conversation was headed. Finally, after a particularly long and
outlandish burst of speculation through which he remained utterly unreadable, I decided to try to bring the matter to a head.
"Dr. Stent, my concern in coming here to discuss this with you is simply that I would like to know whether this theory has any validity or is
simply fallacious."
He seemed to soften slightly and left his position behind the desk to join me in looking westward through the thick, tinted glass. With a sigh of
resignation that was heart sinking to his visitor he turned to me and spoke.
"My dear young friend, these ideas are not even fallacious."
My chagrin was bottomless and I fled, dizzy with embarrassment. So much for my bridge building efforts toward normal science.
Encounters such as that convinced me that I had to relearn epistemology, genetics, philosophy of science—the entire gamut of subjects
necessary to discuss the areas for which I now had such compelling concern. As my study of the / Ching, or Book of Change, advanced, I had
refined the idea that its structure was the basis of a timewave or waves. These waves are discrete periods of change that follow each other as
well as enclose each other. I came to realize that the internal logic of the timewaves strongly implied a termination of normal time and an end
to ordinary history. At that point, the idea of concrescent psycho-matter and the UFO that I had encountered at La Chorrera became identified
in my mind with each other and with the end of time scenarios of the Western religious traditions.
The early unquantified time chart was full of coincidences relative to my own personal life. In particular, the termination points of each
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