true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

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.
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