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true hallucinations.htm We can send that signal only by following the instructions contained in the seeded genes and building the necessary apparatus, social system, or vehicle. When that is done, somewhere in the galaxy lights will flash the message that yet another of the millions upon millions of seeded planets in the galaxy has achieved the threshold of galactic citizenship. Current estimates are that even in a galaxy teeming with intelligence, such a threshold is passed by an intelligent species only once every hundred or thousand years. It is a joyous moment, even for galactarians. If such a speculation has any validity at all, then its very articulation signifies the final moment of the pre-contact phase—and signifies also the pressing need to explore the psilocybin trance and to understand the role that it is playing in the psychology of the human species.* [* New light has been thrown on the phenomenon of voices heard in the head and the role that they may play in the evolution of consciousness. In 1977, Julian Jaynes of Princeton University published a most provocative book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes uses four hundred and forty-five pages to lay out his ideas concerning the role that hallucinations, especially audio hallucinations, have played in the structuring of mind. Jaynes believes that until the time of roughly the Iliad, around 1400 B. C., nothing at all like modern ego-centered and individuated consciousness existed. Instead he argues that people behaved like automata or social insects, unconsciously going about the tasks of the hive. Only in moments of great stress and personal danger was this regimen broken. In such moments an impersonal mind, outside the usual experience of the world, became manifest as a voice. According to Jaynes's theory, such voices were the guiding lights of human society, perhaps for millennia, whether they were understood to be the voice of an absent but living king, a dead king, an omnipresent god, or a personal deity. Migrations and the breakdown of the cultural insularity of the early human civilizations brought an end to man's relations to the bicameral mind, which is Jaynes's term for the cybernetic, god-like presence felt behind the hallucinated voices. Social prejudices against having a relationship with the bicameral mind in modern times has made "hearing voices" into a mystical phenomenon or a serious mental aberration—in any case something very rare. The interested reader should study Jaynes's case carefully, although his book is exasperating, since in a treatise on the role of hallucinations in human history, he fails to offer any serious discussion of hallucinogenic plant use at all. This is a serious failing, especially if the effect triggered by psilocybin is not, as I have suggested, a contact with an intelligence entirely distinct from ourselves. Jaynes's theory opens up the possibility that psilocybin returns one to rapport with the transpersonal Other in a way that duplicates on some level the state of mind that was characteristic of early human populations. It is reasonable to suggest that a voice in the head, interpreted by ancient man as a god, might be interpreted by a naive, modern person as a telepathic contact with extraterrestrials. Whatever "facts" may eventually be known, psilocybin offers a tool that allows direct experience of this voice that explains all things, this Logos of the Other.] CHAPTER TWENTY THE HAWAIIAN CONNECTION In which pirate Mantids from hyperspace attack me and my new lover in the volcanic wastes of Kau, Hawaii, and I deliver my last words on the Unspeakable. The FALL OF 1975 WAS a time of personal change and consolidation. Kat, an old friend met years before in Jerusalem during my opium and kabbala phase, became at last my lover. Eight years had passed since we had circumambulated the Mosque of Omar. She was a tide pool gazer and a solitary traveler. The mushroom had made good its promise to send another partner to share the ongoing journey through the interior world. In October, we went to Hawaii to write and to plan a trip to the Peruvian Amazon in early 1976. And to languish in love. We rented a house in the remote and desolate Kau district of the big island of Hawaii. It was an area of twisted lava flows of all ages. Kapukas were the only vegetation, islanded areas of ancient forest surrounded by frothy seas of hardened rock, which had killed all low-lying and less fortunate life. Slowly, nearly imperceptibly, Mauna Loa's gentle bulk rose up to fourteen thousand feet in the distance behind us. We were at approximately the twenty-five hundred foot file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/All%20Users/Doc...lture/True%20Hallucinations/true%20hallucinations.htm (96 of 106)4/14/2004 10:01:16 PM
true hallucinations.htm level. Our small house fronted the vast and forbidding cinder fields, but the lot ran back into a kapuka whose enclosing shade and many birds and insects provided welcome contrast to the primal devastation that stretched in all directions for miles. Our life was leisurely. I wrote and did some experiments with more arcane aspects of mushroom cultivation. Kat was immersed in doing line drawings for the book Dennis and I had written on Stropharia cubensis cultivation. A sun-filled erotic dream unfolded itself around us. We were isolated, as we both love to be, and we took mushrooms together often. It was during that Hawaiian idyll that I determined to return again to the Amazon Basin to track down the Banisteriopsis caapi in its native setting, in order to satisfy myself as to the role that it and the beta-carboline hallucinogens that it contains played in the experience at La Chorrera. I was especially interested to know if other chemically different aboriginal hallucinogens provoked the same experiences as did the mushroom psilocybin. I wanted to determine if our experiences were part of the general phenomenology of hallucinogens or were unique to psilocybin. At weekly or ten-day intervals throughout that October and November in Hawaii, we took the Stropharia that we had grown. We had an amazing series of experiences. The psilocybin definitely conveys the impression that sometimes other people can see with equal clarity the hallucinations that one is experiencing. Kat and I satisfied ourselves that this was true by taking turns describing the images in which we were immersed. During those times when the flow of images had a certain electric intensity, there was no doubt that we were seeing the same things. The relationship of the psyche to the surface of the body, the skin, is synesthetic and emotionally complex under the influence of psilocybin. Colors and feelings have a tactile quality that ordinary experience never hints of. By having large areas of skin in contact we seemed to somehow obviate the usual psychic individuality and integrity of the body; we would melt into each other's minds in a Tantric climax that was immensely pleasant and full of preposterous and hysterical potential for human growth and parapsychological studies. Ev and I had had no mushrooms since returning to the States. It was wonderful to have someone to again share the mushrooms with, for until Kat joined me, most of my mushroom trips had been entirely alone, one soul adrift in the cosmic ocean. Happily, there were now two of us navigating together through the billows of jeweled and demonically scintillating geometries. Two of those mushroom occasions stand out as especially memorable. The first occurred one evening late in November. We each ate five dried grams of Stropharia and sat inside by the fire watching the slow upwelling of hallucinations from behind closed eyelids. I seemed to see fleeting but prophetic images of the trip that we were planning into the Amazon. Camp fires and trails filled my head. The sound of nearby crickets seemed transformed into the roar of night jungle sounds that awaited us in Peru. We talked together of our plans and our future. The future seemed enormous and open before us. It was that evening that we both became committed to a family and a life together. It was a major turning point for me, I have no doubt. We walked together outside and stood beneath the stars near the sheds and gardens where we daily pursued the yet more perfect cultivation of Stropharia. The night was uncannily still and the sky blazing with stars. Looking into the southern sky, I thought, "If you are out there; if you approve the course we have set our lives on, if the mystery is real, then give us a sign." I stepped toward Kat, who was walking in front of me, to say, "I asked them for a sign." But before I could speak, the sky was rent from mid-heaven to horizon with a crimson streak of meteoric fire. The depth of atunement of psyche and world must be very great for such synchronisms to occur. "Such meteor-burns occur but once in all time," came the mushroom's comment, clear and unbidden into my mind. We sat down then on the warm, receptive earth and abandoned ourselves to the waves of visions and vistas. At one point a revolving night wind whipped the leaves on the otherwise perfectly still trees. The district was a remote one, but borne on the still air over miles and miles, from neighbors and ranches scattered far, we could hear the mournful howl of every dog in that whole part of the island. For hours they moaned and howled in eerie, wavering ululation. We could not imagine what it meant, but we took it as a coincidence as inexplicable as the sky sign on our future. Hours later, in the time of the false dawn, and at 4:49 local time according to seismic instruments scattered around the planet, an earthquake struck. A low, grinding roar moved through the lava fields stretching for miles all around and beneath us. Tidal waves and volcanic activity at Kilauea Caldera, near the epicenter and thirty miles away from us, followed fast on the first shock. An hour later another smaller shock wave occurred. Now the reason for the hours of howling was starkly explained. Thus it was that meteoric signs and a great earthquake—the most intense in Hawaii in a hundred years—attended our mushroom trip and our intensified exploration of the psilocybin deeps, just as we attended them. file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/All%20Users/Doc...lture/True%20Hallucinations/true%20hallucinations.htm (97 of 106)4/14/2004 10:01:16 PM
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