true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
This last speech was heart sinking. "No deal. I understand." But I was thinking, "Oh shit, what have I gotten myself into." We shook hands on
it, and I left to pack my things at the hotel and hurry to the airport.
My mind was in turmoil on the flight back to Bali. One by one the Lesser Sunda Islands slid past beneath me, and as they did, so did my
doubts and my objections to Heintz's offer. "This has the feeling of fate," I thought to myself. "Play it out, give it a chance, and see what
happens."
Over the next week I made my arrangements. I told the story to the freaks of Kuta Beach and most people encouraged me. My lady friend
even supported me. We had agreed months before that Bali might be the parting of the ways for us. Each day I walked to Poste Restante in
Denpasar expecting to find my tickets and the five hundred dollars in travel money that Heintz had promised. Three days went by, then five,
and then seven.
On the morning of the seventh day, I awoke with the conviction that I had been had. It had all been some kind of weird mind game. I decided
that Heintz must be nuts, a weirdo whose idea of fun was to get American freaks to buy into his secret Nazi mega-corporation fantasy and then
drop them into reality just to see how far they would fall. Of course there was another possibility; that somehow they had been able to check
up on me and had discovered my false history. That I was sure would put me in the shoemaker class and effectively cook my goose. Anyway,
I had certainly made an ass of myself by telling everyone in Bali that I was about to board the Rotterdam for a corporate-sponsored trip to the
Amazon. I had to endure lots of good-natured kidding for the next couple of weeks as I returned to my original plan, outfitting myself for a
final Indonesian collecting expedition out to Ambon and Seram in the Moluccas.
And there the matter rested. I buried the whole episode in a tomb in the back of my mind marked "Weird People You Meet on the Road." But
it was an unquiet grave. A year later, in the aftermath of La Chorrera, I decided that it had been a precursive reflection of the true craziness
that did finally find me in the Amazon. It had been an anticipation, a wavering in the time
field, a kind of living prophetic dream, an instance of the cosmic giggle. But it wasn't the last I would see of Herr Heintz either.
A year after the events at La Chorrera and two years after my visit to Timor, in the spring of 1972, I was in Boulder, Colorado. I had returned
from South America to settle my legal status and try to put life on the road behind me. Dennis and I were working together on the manuscript
of The Invisible Landscape and spending a lot of time at the university library, studying the various disciplines that had to be mastered if our
ideas were to stand a chance of being taken seriously.
One day I was scanning the student newspaper when I came upon a startling announcement. A full page had been reserved to announce that
the University of Colorado, in association with the Max Planck Institute for Neurophysiology, would co-sponsor the next meeting of the
World Congress of the Neurosciences. At the words "Max Planck Institute" my attention sharpened and I read on. Seven hundred scientists
from around the world would be converging in Boulder for ten days of meetings and seminars. All the greats would be in attendance: Sir John
Eccles, John Smythies, Solomon Snyder, and all the rest, the gods of the very Valhalla that we dreamed of conquering. The catch was that all
the meetings would be closed to the general public with the single exception of the opening address, which would be titled "Autocatalytic
Hyper-cycles" and would be delivered by the then-reigning star in the world of neuroscience, Manfred Eigen of the Max Planck Institute.
I was familiar with the outlines of Eigen's ideas. Autocatalytic hypercycles seemed to me an obvious necessary correlative to the ideas that I
was working out concerning the timewave and the way in which it was expressed and reflected in living organisms. This was something that
Ev, Dennis, and I simply had to attend. However, I did not give the Planck Institute much thought, as it is the major, pure science research
outfit in Germany with hundreds of researchers on its payroll.
The lecture was to be held on campus in the Physical Science Lecture Hall, a barrel-shaped enclosure that placed the lecturer at
the bottom of a deep well surrounded on three sides by tiers of seats, somewhat in the manner of an old style operating theater. There had
apparently been a black tie dinner for the invited speakers before the lecture, and as we filed in to take our places I was impressed that the
usually dowdy science crowd had dressed to the nines for the event. There was a babble of languages. From where I sat I could hear German,
Italian, Japanese, Russian, a smattering of Hindi, Spanish, and Chinese.
As my eyes roved over the crowd, I suddenly experienced something very close to a physical jolt. There, less than fifty feet away from me and
nearly directly across the intervening open space, sat Dr. Karl Heintz! I felt absolute amazement. Heintz! Here! Could it be? Somehow I must
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