true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
component section of the wave seemed to have special meaning for me. Positioning one of these points on the experiment at La Chorrera
seemed to make other points in the past (the death of my mother and my meeting with Ev), and points then in the future (my twenty-fifth
birthday), especially important. I saw that important events in my own life seemed to be occurring every sixty-four days with eerie regularity.
It was necessary to work these ideas out alone, since my intensity concerning them and their paradoxical nature looked absurd in the eyes of
other people. I understood that whether or not the effect I was exploring was a general phenomenon in nature or a unique idiosyncrasy, it was
obviously vitally important
for me, personally, to let the forces I had become entangled with play themselves out to the end.
Bizarre as the plan seemed to others, I resolved to return to La Chorrera, to its solitude and its strangeness, and to spend time there simply and
calmly observing the thing that had come over me. Ev and I had bought emeralds as one of our last acts before leaving Colombia and the sale
of these was more than enough to finance our return to the surreal domain of sunlight, forests, and rivers that had spawned my obsession.
Once back at La Chorrera, I was determined to write down all that had overtaken us; that was my resolve, and much of the early draft of The
Invisible Landscape was the result. This decision to depart California was hailed by my circle in Berkeley. Concern for my mental state was
rife among my friends, and rumor had reached us that the FBI was aware that I was somewhere back inside the country and had begun looking
for me. The Bombay-to-Aspen hashish blues were catching up with me. It was, as they say, time to make a move.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
RETURN
In which Ev and I return alone to La Chorrera and a new comet heads toward the earth.
On THE FIFTEENTH of July, Ev and I again stood on the edge of the Amazon interior. My intention to return to La Chorrera was fast
becoming fact. My journal takes up again as we started down the Rio Putumayo, a name that by then suggested to me an etymology like "the
whore of illusion":
July 15, 1971
Having left the vicinity of Puerto Leguizamo a few hours ago with our cargo of beer and cattle, Ev and I are once again enclosed by and
moving through the dream that is the forests and rivers of the Amazon Basin. This return to continue the contemplation of the phenomenon in
the pure medium of tropical nature in which we discovered it marks a dedication to and an immersion in the phenomenon that, I imagine,
anyone familiar with the events which overtook us in March finds incredible and even perhaps not without an element of risk.
I refer not to danger inherent in the jungle or to the inevitable hardships attendant upon travel in remote areas, but rather to the psychological
stress inherent in confronting the phenomenon—
strangely so much a part of one's self and yet vast and other--away from the mitigating world of friends and a world that is unaware or
skeptical concerning our encounter with the phenomenon and the subsequent understanding which we derived from it. My first consideration
in this area is to do all in my ability to eliminate the unexpected. My brothers crypto-schizophrenic reversal is ever in my mind in this regard. I
believe we are dealing with something to which no vagueness or uncertainty of inner dynamics adheres. Careful thought and study can
eliminate the possibility of the contact phenomenon suddenly "turning on us" or otherwise behaving unexpectedly.
The right approach to these things remains elusive. Again and again the "inner voice" of the phenomenon has insisted that since my brother's
opus of hyper-carbolation nothing at all remains to be done, and that if something is required in the way of activity, then by virtue of the very
nature of the contact, that something will be precisely what we are doing.
Ev and I lived quietly at La Chorrera from August until mid-November of 1971. There were moments of frequent high hilarity. And during
that time I was able to completely indulge my submersion in the interior processes that I was experiencing. My days were filled with long,
thoughtful walks on the trails around La Chorrera and by hours crouched over the tablets of graph paper that I had brought with me. There in
the center of the Amazon greenery I elaborated my theories of time and covered sheet after sheet of paper with my wave mechanical fantasies.
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