true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
When not reading or daydreaming, Ev and I indulged ourselves in long conversations in which the new view of being in the world seemed
almost within reach.
During this second residency at La Chorrera, the theme of oo-koo-he recurred. We made the acquaintance of several of the Witoto people who
regularly walked the path near our own hut, which was a few hundred yards down the same trail where the original experiment had taken
place. Among those Witoto who stopped to exchange a word or watch me collecting insects was a sturdy older man named Demetrius. He was
a cloudy-eyed old weasel who positively exuded the stench of the cosmic gatekeeper. In my excited
state of mind, the letters D, M, T seemed to stand out in his name like a beacon. As soon as I could get him alone I haltingly put the question
to him.
"Oo-koo-he?"
"Oo-koo-he!" He was barely able to believe his ears. It must have been incredible to him that this strange, weak creature, like something from
another world, should directly inquire after a secret tradition of his people. I have no idea how many cultural conventions were overlooked,
but after a bit more conversation, or what passes for conversation between people who share no common language, I was sure that he would
try to help me. Days later, on my twenty-fifth birthday, I was brought a tarry goo wrapped into little leaf packets. I was never able to obtain a
hallucinogenic experience from this material, but later analysis by the chemists of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm confirmed the
presence of di-methyltryptamine. Demetrius had been as good as his name.
The important thing about the second trip to La Chorrera was that the teaching of the Logos was more or less continuous. And what it taught
during those months and afterward was an idea about time. It is an idea that is very concrete and has mathematical rigor. The Logos taught me
how to do something with the / Ching that perhaps no one knew how to do before. Perhaps the Chinese knew how to do it once and then lost it
thousands of years ago. It taught me a hyper-temporal way of seeing. My books, my public life, my private dreams have all become a part of
the effort to feel and understand the new time that was revealed at La Chorrera. A revolution in human understanding is not something that
can be corralled within the confines of a conversation.
This new model of time enables one to have as much of a certain kind of knowledge about the future as it is possible to have. The future is not
absolutely determined; there is not, in other words, a future to "see" in which every event has already been determined. That isn't how the
universe is put together. The future is not yet completed, but it is conditioned. Mysteriously, out of the set of all possible events, certain events
are selected, in Whitehead's phrase, to undergo the formality of actually occurring. The Logos was concerned to reveal the mechanics of this
process and did reveal it as the idea of the timewave.
What had originally gotten me looking at the / Ching was the odd way in which my early, simplistic notion of sixty-four day cycles worked
very well in my own life at the time. My mother's death was the first of these points in time that I isolated. Then I noted that my chanceformed
relationship with Ev had begun sixty-four days after that, and that the culmination of the experiment at La Chorrera had occurred
another sixty-four days later. The notion of a hexagram-based lunar year grew out of the idea of six cycles of sixty-four days each, a year of
six parts, just as an / Ching hexagram has six lines.
The personal worth of the idea was confirmed for me when I noticed that such a year of three hundred and eighty-four days, if begun at the
time of my mother's death, would end on my own twenty-fifth birthday on November 16, 1971. I saw then that there were cycles and there
were cycles of cycles: I imagined a three-hundred-and-eighty-four day lunar year and then the larger thing of which it was a part, a cycle of
sixty-four times three hundred and eight-four days, and so on. The maps that I constructed and the eventual qualification of them that I
achieved are described in The Invisible Landscape. But what was not told there were the experiences at La Chorrera and the way in which
these coincidences and my unconscious mind—or something in my mind—guided me to discover these long hidden properties of the / Ching.
What to make of the ocean of resonances that the timewave seemed to show connecting every moment of time to every other moment through
a scheme of connection that knew nothing of randomness or causality? And what to make of the fact that certain details in the mathematics of
the wave seemed to imply that the time in which we live was the focus of an ages-long and terribly important effort? These were inflationary
images—and I recognized them as such—but the power and allure of them as a form of private entertainment was frankly irresistible.
The timewave seemed to be an image from the collective unconscious that sought to prove, at least in its own terms, that the culmination of all
the processes in the universe would occur within our lifetimes. For each of us this is obviously true: our own lives do seem to us, embedded as
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