true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

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.
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