true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
"Share my pleasure at this puzzle and its resolution," said the darker to the older, and he passed his hand across his companion 's eyes. The
older man then stood in the dream and watched the puzzle—a world of form and law, interlocking wheels and passion and intellect—unfold.
He passed into its species and empires, dynastic families and individual men of genius, he became its philosophers and weathered its
catastrophes. He felt the texture and tone of all the beings in the world his friend had created. He sought the secret pattern his friend, he knew,
had surely hidden in his creation, for this was a game that they often played.
Finally, in a great despotism, in an age of brash science and bright decadence, he saw himself divided into the persons of two brothers—and
through them, through their wanderings and lifetimes which passed before him in a moment, he perceived the intricate and pleasing nature of
the riddle. Understanding at last, he dissolved the mists and wheels of the dream fable with a laugh—a laugh they shared. And then once more
they passed their pipe before strolling into the azure garden where dawn would find them conversing among the peacocks, beneath the
pomegranates and bending acacias.
Are we to be left then with nothing but fable? Or is there more here? Tropical gardens that I have planted have in them small acacias straining
toward maturity. Perhaps there is still time for them to grow into shade for philosophical rambles. Life is stranger than even the strangest
among us can suppose.
The work at La Chorrera felt finished then. We folded our camp and retraced trails and rivers. It took time, there were books to write, loose
ends to a life too loosely lived to be tidied and trimmed. We lived for a time in Florencia at the finca of a friend. There I wrote some of the
early chapters of The Invisible Landscape. We went through the Christmas holidays of 1971 there, but the
writing was slow, the lack of reference materials frustrating. We returned to the States and lived in Boulder with Dennis for a few months,
during which I worked in the local hot house rose industry. It was a series of mundane American adventures. Eventually though we found
ourselves back in Berkeley.
Until the / Ching timewave was quantified with more data, its way of integrating seemingly meaningless and unrelated factors made it very
easy to become psychologically entangled within. It seemed to operate like a kind of bottomless inkblot test; one could see whatever one
wished to see in it. Even though my twenty-fifth birthday came and went with very little shift toward the novel, either in my own life or in the
world, I continued to propagate the cycles of the chart forward into the future. I felt that the idea of a hidden structure of time was correct but
that this could not be argued for until the correct alignment between that structure and human history had been found and confirmed. I began
looking for a date with special features related to the wave, a date that would be a good candidate for the emergence of a special event.
Here is a part of my story that I found most puzzling: After the seeming disconfirmation of the cycles by my birthday, I looked at other future
dates on which the three-hundred-and-eighty-four day cycles would end if I continued to assume that the sixteenth of November, 1971, was
the end of one such cycle. That meant that the next ending date of the three hundred and eighty-four day cycle would be the fourth of
December, 1972. I consulted several astronomical tables, but the date seemed unpromising. The closing date of the next three hundred and
eighty-four cycle was immediately more interesting, as it fell on the twenty-second day of December, 1973.
I noticed this was the winter solstice. Here was a clue. The winter solstice is traditionally the time of the rebirth of the savior messiah. It is a
time of pause when there is a shifting of the cosmic machinery. It is also the time of the transition of the sun from Sagittarius to Capricorn. I
put no particular stock in astrology, but I noted that Dennis is a Sagittarius and Ev a Capricorn. I consulted my star
maps and added another coincidence: where the ecliptic crosses the cusp of Sagittarius and Capricorn, at 23 degrees Sagittarius, is the very
spot to within one or two degrees where the galactic center is presently located. Over twenty-six thousand years the galactic center, like all
points on the ecliptic, slowly moves through the signs, but now it was on the cusp of Sagittarius and Capricorn on the winter solstice day.
This seemed an unusual number of coincidences and so I pressed my search. Consultation with the almanac of the Naval Observatory brought
a real surprise. On the very day that I was researching, December 22, 1973, a total, annular eclipse of the sun would occur and the path of
totality would sweep directly across La Chorrera and the Amazon Basin. I was dumbfounded. I felt like a person in a novel; this string of clues
was actually real! I researched the eclipse to determine exactly where it would achieve totality. This would occur, I learned, almost directly
over the city of Belem in Brazil, in the delta of the Amazon River. The vertiginous elf chatter of hyperspace rose squealing in my ears. Was it
mocking me or egging me on?
Meditation on this eclipse data carried my mind out of the realm of astronomical coincidence and back to the motifs of the trances at La
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