true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

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true hallucinations.htm will move toward meeting. The saucer is an excellent metaphor for this. When Jung suggested that the saucer was the human soul, he was more correct than he may have supposed. It is not so far away. That is the other thing. The last shift of epochs gave us relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Another epochal shift looms, but whether or not it is the final epoch is hard to say. Our roles as parts of the process introduces an uncertainty in our observations that bedevils prediction. All these themes are woven around DMT, possibly because DMT creates a microcosm of this very shift of epochs in the experience of a single individual. It seems to lift the perceiving mind out of the confines of ordinary space and time and give a glimpse of the largest frame of being possible. When Plato remarked that "Time is the moving image of Eternity," he made a statement every voyage into the DMT space reinforces. Like the shift of epoch called the apocalypse and anticipated by religious hysterics, DMT seems to illuminate the regions beyond death. And what is the dimension beyond life as illuminated by DMT? If we can trust our own perceptions, then it is a place in which thrives an ecology of souls whose stuff of being is more syntactical than material. It seems to be a nearby realm inhabited by eternal elfin entelechies made entirely of information and joyous self-expression. The afterlife is more Celtic fairyland than existential nonentity; at least that is the evidence of the DMT experience. We human beings must admit that ours is a peculiar situation: having been born, we are autonomous, open chemical systems that maintain themselves through metabolism at a point far from equilibrium. And we are creatures of thought. What is that? What are the three dimensions? What is energy? We find ourselves in the strange position of being alive. Having been born, we know we are going to die. A lot of thinking says that this is not so strange, that this happens in the universe—living things appear. And yet our physics, which can light the fires of the stars in our deserts, cannot explain the strangeness of the phenomenon of our being alive. Organisms are completely outside the realm of physical explanation at this point for science. So what is it for? Spenser and Shakespeare, quantum theory and the cave paintings at Altamira. Who are we? What is history? And what does it push toward? Now we have unleashed processes potentially fatal to the planet. We have triggered the final crises for all life. We have done this, but we do not control it. No single one of us. No leader or state can call a halt to the fact of our being trapped in history. We are moving toward the unimaginable as information piles up about the real nature of the situation we confront. To paraphrase J. B. S. Haldane: Our situation may not only be stranger than we suppose; it may be stranger that we can suppose. CHAPTER NINETEEN THE COMING OF THE STROPHARIAD In which Ev and I part company and the mushroom delivers an oration while turning into an underground growth industry. SUCH ARE THE CONCERNS with which I navigated the intervening years to the present. But during the two year period after my second return from La Chorrera, before the publication of The Invisible Landscape in 1975, I was not idle. My brother and I concluded that the truly novel element, the candidate for being the causal agent at La Chorrera, was the mushrooms. It was Stropharia cubensis that stood behind all of the effects we had experienced. As this realization grew, so did the understanding that new expeditions into the unimaginable could be launched only if a supply of mushrooms could be secured. It happened that on the second trip to La Chorrera the mushroom had been much less abundant than before. This scarcity had impelled me to take a number of spore prints from the few specimens that we did run across. Those spore prints had been kept refrigerated over the years while my brother and I pursued academic careers and wrote our book. During those years we dabbled with the thought of cultivating Stropharia cubensis, but the only work on the subject was Wasson and Heim's work in French, and it somehow seemed a remote and technically difficult thing to attempt. In the spring of 1972, we had already isolated the mycelium of the mushroom and had it growing on agar in petri dishes. But we could get nothing to happen. Then in the early spring of 1975 we encountered an article detailing a method for growing commercial mushrooms on rye in canning jars under very carefully controlled conditions. We wondered if perhaps this method would also work for Stropharia cubensis and get our stalled exploration of the invisible world moving again. file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/All%20Users/Doc...lture/True%20Hallucinations/true%20hallucinations.htm (92 of 106)4/14/2004 10:01:16 PM
true hallucinations.htm Ev and I had parted earlier in 1975. Our relationship of convenience formed on the road had not flowered after we returned to careers and school stateside. Ev quickly found work and I did not. Later she enrolled in secretarial school and I went back to Cal to finish my degree in Conservation of Natural Resources. How far we seemed to have fallen from the exaulted vistas revealed at La Cho-rrera. Our lives were financially marginal, intellectually constrained, and eventually our attachments and interests went elsewhere. When the breakup finally came it was ugly and heartrending. We may have seen into the heart of the mysteries, but that did not mean that we were any wiser than ordinary people when it came to the affairs of our own hearts. Ev departed from my life in the company of an old friend of mine from my days at the Experimental College, and I was left confused and defensive by what felt like a double betrayal. The awful conclusion of our long affair left me tormented with migraines and living alone. I was finishing up schooling that had lasted far too long, what with seven years of wandering around the world scheduled in. It was a time of loneliness, self-examination, and the pressure of pressure. During the weeks in which Ev and I were continuously fighting and struggling to find some sort of inner equilibrium, I had thrown myself into a state of hypermanic activity centered around the effort to grow the mushrooms. And then, when we finally parted, I dropped it completely and seemed to spend weeks either sitting staring at the walls or walking for hours in the Berkeley hills and Strawberry Canyon. One day, returning from one of my long, introspective rambles, I thought of my abandoned experiments with a new method of growing mushrooms using beds of sterilized rye. Now the beds were doubtlessly dried out or rotting in the small, unattended greenhouse in the backyard. "I should clean out the greenhouse and empty the experimental beds," I thought. If I did that perhaps it would be the beginning of cleaning up my now excessively messy and unhappy psychic life. I had not so much as looked in the greenhouse for over two weeks. The reluctant greenhouse door was nearly swollen shut and only opened with a rending screech. And there they were! By the dozens, by the hundreds, huge picture perfect specimens of Stropharia. The dark night of the soul had turned my attention elsewhere, and in that moment they had perfected themselves. I was neck deep in alchemical gold! The elf legions of hyperspace had ridden to my rescue again. I was saved! As I knelt to examine specimen after perfect specimen, tears of joy streamed down my face. Then I knew that the compact was still unbroken, the greatest adventure still lay ahead. Working in close consultation with Dennis, who was back in Boulder, we determined within a matter of weeks that the hardy Stropharia not only grew and fruited with the new method, but that they could be more easily grown than the Agaricas species sold in grocery stores as food. The implications of all this were a constant topic of our endless telephone consultations. From the spring of 1975 onward I was not without a continual supply of Stropharia. Into my world of humdrum grief suddenly appeared the perfected method for growing the same organism that had opened up the dimension of contact four years before. The very spores gathered at La Chorrera were now furiously producing mushroom psilocybin in my home. During the spring, I experimented with low dosages several times. The sense of peace and lightness that I associated with the halcyon days at La Chorrera was definitely there; so too was the presence of a teaching voice and a return to close consultation with a cosmic agency of complex intent. Throughout the spring and summer of 1975, I took the mushroom at doses of five grams dried, or fifty grams fresh, as often as I felt was prudent, which worked out to about once every two weeks. Each of these experiences was a lesson—a chilling, exhilarating plunge into an ocean of noetic images. I discovered my own mind like a topological manifold, lying before me, inviting me to rove and scan the reflective knot of past and future time that is each of us. Alien presences and translinguistic elves bent near to me in those trances. The mushroom stressed its age, its vast knowledge of the ebb and flow of historical forces in many civilizations through the millennia. Images of the past and future abounded. Once I found myself on a hill with a crowd of people. The view looked out over a curved plain. It was the interior of a cylindrical space colony miles wide with vast sweeps of windows alternating with farmlands and towns scattered along the floors of the valleys. I knew somehow that in the particular future I was seeing, hundreds of millions of people lived in such cylindrical worlds. The teeming worlds that populate the galaxy in the minds of our science fiction writers had been recreated inside a sphere only twelve light-hours in diameter with the sun at its center. Within that sphere thousands of independent societies pursued their destinies and their evolution; thousands of independent cylinder worlds swarmed around the vast energy furnace of the sun. What a rich and endlessly creative force humanity had become in escaping the confines of the planet! Through the vast windows I could see more advanced machinery being made ready, glittering, obsidian machinery built to challenge the mind-numbing distances that lie between us and the suns of Centaurus. Before me was the spectacle of the departure preparations of a starship. In my mind Copeland's Fanfare for the Common Man was being played. file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/All%20Users/Doc...lture/True%20Hallucinations/true%20hallucinations.htm (93 of 106)4/14/2004 10:01:16 PM
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