True Hallucinations Part 12

There is nothing magical about this, and it does not seem mysterious to us: wind, a pressure that is variable over time, creates a rippled dune, which is a structure regularly variable in s.p.a.ce. In my thinking, the genes of organisms are grains of sand arranged by the ebb and flow of the winds of time. Naturally, then, organisms bear the imprint of the inherent variables in the temporal medium in which they arose. DNA is the blank slate upon which the changing temporal variables have had their sequence and relative differences recorded. Any technique that saw into the energetic relations.h.i.+ps within a living organism, such as yoga or the use of psychedelic plants, would also give a deep insight concerning the variable nature of time. The King Wen sequence of the / Ching is the product of this kind of insight.

Human culture is a curve of expanding potentiality. In our own tormented century it has reached vertical gain. Human beings threaten every species on the planet. We have stockpiled radioactive materials everywhere, and every species on earth can feel this. The planet when viewed as a sentient ent.i.ty can react to this kind of pressure. It is three billion years old, and it has many options.

Dualistic talk about humanity not being part of the natural order is foolish. We could not have arisen unless we served a purpose that fit into the planetary ecology. It is not clear what our purpose is, but it seems to have to do with our enormous research instruments.

And crises! By stockpiling atomic weapons, we have claimed the capacity to destroy the earth like a stick of dynamite in a rotten apple. Why? We do not know why. Surely not for the political and social reasons that are given. We are simply a tool-building species that is itself the tool of a planetary ecology that is a higher intelligence. It knows what the dangers and limits on the cosmic scale are and it is furiously organizing life to both preserve and transform itself.

My story is a peculiar one. It is hard to know what to make of it. The notion of some kind of fantastically complicated visionary revelation that happens to put one at the very center of the action is a symptom of mental illness. This theory does that, and yet so does immediate experience, and so do the ontologies of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. My theory may be clinically pathological, but unlike these religious systems, I have enough humor to realize this. It is important to appreciate the intrinsic comedy of privileged knowledge. It is also important to have recourse to the scientific method whenever appropriate. Most scientific theories can be disproven in the calm confines of the laboratory, evolution to the contrary.

To empathize with the visions at La Chorrera one must imagine what one can imagine.

Imagine if wishes were horses, how beggars would ride. The ideas developed at La Chorrera were so compelling because they promised new dimensions of human freedom.

The Amazonian rumors of time-binding magical fluids self-generated out of the bodies of master shamans are nothing less than intimations of the metamorphosis of the human body/mind into a higher-dimensional state. Were such a transformation of matter possible, one could do anything with it. One might spread it out and climb on it and take it up to any alt.i.tude, adding oxygen at will. It's the haunting image of the flying saucer yet again. One can climb inside it: putting on your mind like a mental wet suit. The flying saucer is an image of the perfected human mind: waiting, warmly humming, at the end of human history on this planet. When it is perfect, there will be an ontological mutation of the human form, nothing less than the resurrection-body that Christianity antic.i.p.ates.

It is the genius of human technology to master and to serve the energies of life and death and time and s.p.a.ce. The UFO holds out the possibility of mind become object, a s.h.i.+p that can cross the universe in the time it takes to think about it. Because that is what the universe is-a thought. And when thought becomes mobile and objectified, then humanity-novices in the mastery of thought- will begin to set out.

Of course we may discover that we are not to set out; the future may reveal instead that there is something out there calling us home. Then it will be our technology and the call of the Other that

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 s.h.i.+ft of epochs gave us relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Another epochal s.h.i.+ft 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 s.h.i.+ft of epochs in the experience of a single individual. It seems to lift the perceiving mind out of the confines of ordinary s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce reinforces. Like the s.h.i.+ft of epoch called the apocalypse and antic.i.p.ated 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 nonent.i.ty; 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 Wa.s.son 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.

Ev and I had parted earlier in 1975. Our relations.h.i.+p 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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 hypers.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sociated 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 s.p.a.ce 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 stars.h.i.+p. In my mind Copeland's Fanfare for the Common Man was being played.

On other occasions I saw alternative futures where the knowledge of the mushroom was not fused with humanity's restless expansionism. I saw a planet covered with a society of slave-worker machine symbiots. I saw the life of North American society running through several hundred years of upheaval and political change, an image like a great animated, war-planning map. The dualism of fascism and democracy hung around North America's neck like an albatross. Again and again, nightmare police-state fascism would sweep like a fouled tide over the aspirations of the people, and again and again, the subtlety of the people would organize against the stupidity of the oppressor. They would rise in wild and b.l.o.o.d.y

revolt to secure the s.p.a.ce of a few generations in which to inaugurate attempts at democratic social reform.

The mushroom always returned to the theme that it was wise in the ways of evolution and sympathetic therefore to a symbiotic union with what it referred to as "the human beings." It was eager to share its own sense of the howness of things, a sense that had been developed over millions of years of conscious experience as an intelligent organism radiating through the galaxy. From its point of view, the mushroom is an elder life form, and as such it offers its tempering experience to a vibrant but naive child-race standing for the first time on the brink of flight to the stars. As our imagination has striven outward to attempt to encompa.s.s the possibility of the intelligent Other somewhere in the starry galaxy, so has the Other, observing this, revealed itself to be among us, when we are in the psilocybin trance, as an aspect of ourselves. In the phenomenon of Stropharia cubensis, we are confronted with an intelligent and seemingly alien life-form, not as we commonly imagine it, but an intelligent alien life nevertheless. In the often zany way that it does, popular culture has antic.i.p.ated even this odd turn of events. Invasion of the Mushroom People, a schlocko-socko B science fiction film from those same good folks who brought us G.o.dzilla, contains a final scene in which a team of j.a.panese explorers are transformed beyond the reach of audience identification into a group of mushrooms singing together in an islanded Asian rain forest.

Only an anachronistic lack of informed self-reflection would lead one to suppose that an intelligent, alien life-form would be even remotely like ourselves. Evolution is an unceasing river of forms and adaptive solutions to special conditions, and culture is even more so. It is far more likely that an alien intelligence would be barely recognizable to us than that it should overwhelm us with such similarities as humanoid form and an intimate knowledge of our gross industrial capacity. Star-traveling species could be presumed to have a sophisticated knowledge of genetics and DNA function and therefore would not necessarily bear the form that evolution on a native planet had given them. They might well look as they wished to look. The mushroom, with its habit of living off nonliving organic matter and its cobweb-fragile underground network of ephemeral mycelium, seems an organism designed with

Buddhist values of noninterference and low environmental impact in mind.

In the late summer of 1975, Dennis and I decided that the world we were exploring required a wider audience. We hoped to establish a community of consensus about what was going on. To that end we wrote and published a guide to the method we had developed cultivating the Stropharia. At the beginning of that little book, I introduced what we had personally learned about the world of the mushroom: The mushroom speaks, and our opinions rest upon what it tells eloquently of itself in the cool night of the mind: "I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than your history. Though I have been on earth for ages, I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the s.h.i.+ning disk of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to s.e.x thrills and sun bathing. My true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections than the number in a human brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal-only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out. By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality, all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyperlight communication across s.p.a.ce and time. The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider's web, but the collective hypermind and memory is a huge historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. s.p.a.ce, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across the aeons of time and s.p.a.ce drift many spore- forming life-forms in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a suitable environment. Few such species are minded, only myself and my recently

evolved near relatives have achieved the hypercommuni-cation mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members in the community of galactic intelligence. How the hypercommunication mode operates is a secret which will not be lightly given to man. But the means should be obvious: It is the occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and my symbiots the vision screens to many worlds. You as an individual and humanity as a species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic relations.h.i.+p with my genetic material that will eventually carry humanity and earth into the galactic mainstream of the higher civilizations.

"Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you, your most advanced theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. But beyond the cohesion of the members of a species into a single social organism there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary possibilities. Symbiosis is one of these. Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for both the species involved. Symbiotic relations.h.i.+ps between myself and civilized forms of higher animals have been established many times and in many places throughout the long ages of my development. These relations.h.i.+ps have been mutually useful; within my memory is the knowledge of hyperlight-drive s.h.i.+ps and how to build them. I will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns less forsaken and nearer galaxy center. To secure an eternal existence down the long river of cosmic time, I again and again offer this agreement to higher beings and thereby have spread throughout the galaxy over the long millennia. A mycelial network has no organs to move the world, no hands; but higher animals with manipulative abilities can become partners with the star knowledge within me and if they act in good faith can return both themselves and their humble mushroom teacher to the million worlds all citizens of our star swarm are heir to."

Something that refers to itself as being as fragile and diaphanous as a spider's web-for such is the mycelial network of the mushroom-was not only able to communicate with me but was able to convey a vision of greater grandure and more transcendent hope than I had ever dared to dream possible. It was moving and breathtaking, but was it true?

My own reaction to the mushroom's claims concerning the extraterrestrial origin of tryptamine hallucinogens and the visions that they bear has taken many forms. I think that it is possible that certain of these compounds could be "seeded genes" injected into the planetary ecology eons ago by an automated s.p.a.ce-probe arriving here from a civilization somewhere else in the galaxy. Such genes could have been carried along in the genome of a mushroom or some other plant, awaiting only the advent of another intelligence and its discovery of them to begin reading out a message that opens with the bizarre dimension familiar to shamans everywhere. The point of such a message could only be made clear when those for whom the message was intended had advanced to a sufficient level of technical achievement to appreciate it. The exponential growth of a.n.a.lytical tools and methods over the past century may indicate that we are now approaching such a level. I speculate that the final content of the message will be instructions-it will be called a "discovery"-of how to build a matter-transmitter or some other device that will allow us direct contact with the civilization that sent the message-bearing hallucinogen genes to earth so many aeons ago. The trances imply that such a civilization has a faster-than-light technology for information, if not for matter itself, but a receiver is required at the arrival point, otherwise the alien presence within the mushroom is as bound by the constraints of general relativity, as are we.

Something, someone, has seeded intragalactic s.p.a.ce with automatic biomechanical probes. These probes are immensely sophisticated by our standards, able to tailor-make message-bearing hallucinogens for the special ecological conditions that the probe may encounter and to release virus-like pseudo-organisms able to carry the artificial genes into the nucleoplasm of the target species and to implant them there. This is a far more enduring form of message than a solid-state monolith on the moon or an orbiting monitor.

The artificial genes may be carried along in the stream of evolution

for literally hundreds of millions of years without substantial degradation of their message. The information carried by the probe and broadcast by the hallucinogens is modulated by the needs of evolving intelligent life on whatever planet is contacted.

Gradually the emphasis of the information available from the probe s.h.i.+fts. Predictions of good hunting, simple divinatory results like the finding of lost objects, and the provision of medical advice are slowly superseded by the revelation of the extraterrestrial source of this information and the purpose behind it: construction of the star antenna and the entry into the Logos of galactic civilization that it will bring.

Speculative ideas indeed! But strangely enough many of the most current calculations and ideas about the density of life and intelligence in the galaxy confront exobiologists with the dilemma of why we have not yet been contacted. Cyril Ponnamperuma and A.

G. W. Cameron's Scientific Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Communication gives an excellent overview of current thinking on the subject. R. N. Bracewell's contribution printed in the same work was the basis of my own ideas about interstellar probes.

I will summarize the state of the art thus: current thinking concludes that the peak of the emergence of intelligence in the galaxy was achieved ten to one hundred million years ago, that most races in the galaxy are very old and sophisticated. We cannot expect such races to appear with a trumpet-blast over every city on earth. Such an entry into history is tantamount to cras.h.i.+ng into someone's house completely unannounced-hardly the sort of thing that one would expect from a subtle and ancient galactic civilization. Perhaps they have always been here, or rather their presence has always been here in the hallucinogens-when we understand this on our own, we will be signaling to them that we are now ready for the contact.

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 citizens.h.i.+p. Current estimates are that even in a galaxy teeming with intelligence, such a threshold is pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d, 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, G.o.d-like presence felt behind the hallucinated voices. Social prejudices against having a relations.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d, 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 hypers.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed since we had circ.u.mambulated 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

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 relations.h.i.+p 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.

The second, and in many ways more puzzling, major mushroom experience that we shared in Hawaii brought to an end any further exploration of psilocybin until after our return from the Peruvian Amazon. It was the twenty-third of December, the day before Dennis would arrive to spend the Christmas holidays with us. Kat and I each took five dried grams and settled down before the fireplace to await the first wave of images. Soon we were deep into it. The mushroom was showing me a watery, blue-green planet with no land except a globe-girdling archipelago at the equator-a kind of super-Indonesia.

Accompanying the views of the planet was a narration explaining that this oxygen-rich world was within one hundred light years of earth and was totally uninhabited by higher animals. As the implications of this last bit of data came home, I felt a wave of acquisitiveness that seemed to come right out of my primate gonads, a reaction to a million years of nomadism and the restless swelling of human populations. The narration was explaining that when the symbiotic fusion of humanity and the Stropharia was completed, "the human beings" would be free to claim such planets for the Strophariad.

The narration had become personified into the inner voice that attends the mushroom trance. With it I began a discussion of the view of the watery planet and the technology such views implied. I wondered about the technology of star-travel and remote imaging. I asked the mushroom whether, for all the extravagant images it is able to bestow, could it produce any effect in the normal continuum?

I had the idea that if we should go outside, as we usually did at some point in our journeys, we might see some continuation of the

cloud-related phenomenon that had been a part of the experience at La Chorrera. Kat complained of being very hot and agreed that we should go outdoors. We were very unsteady on our feet, and though Kat said very little, I felt considerable alarm for her.

However I a.s.sumed that going outdoors would be sufficient to cool her off.

Outside, we stood unsteadily in the front yard. The night was overcast. Kat seemed to be lapsing in and out of consciousness. It was becoming harder and harder to rouse her. She kept saying that they were burning her, but that she thought she could hold them back. Finally, she collapsed altogether and I could not get any response. We were so isolated that it was impossible to get any sort of outside help. It would have taken hours to get anyone there, and doubtless no one on the entire island knew more than we did about psilocybin. The overwhelming gestalt of the situation was that somehow we had been placed in the scales of life and death, and that whatever was to be done was to be done by us alone and within the next very few minutes.

I remembered that at the back of the house, near where we were accustomed to sunbathing, there was a large tub of water, which held the overflow from our rainwater collecting system. Even though I knew that we were in the face of a mortal threat, it required a complete organization of my consciousness to think of emptying that water over Kat. But as soon as I thought of it, it seemed to give the swirling world a direction. I picked her up in a single, sweeping motion and carried her, lurching through the dark, past the spiky palms now fantastic in the darkness. The moment was excruciatingly grotesque: my drawstring pants had fallen about my ankles so that I walked bare-a.s.sed and stiff-legged like Frankenstein's monster, carrying unconscious Kat.

I laid her on the ground and began to empty can after can of clear, black and silver silken water over every inch of her. It was immediately apparent that we had found the antidote to whatever was making her feel a burning sensation and dragging her into unconsciousness. We tearfully and joyously embraced there in the water and mud, both sensing that this very uncharacteristic effect of the mushroom had been a close call. As we knelt together, realizing that we had surmounted the difficulty that had confronted us, a wild peal of unearthly sound-a howling laughter-split the

air from the direction of the ancient woods behind the house. This laughter was like the scream of a panic-inducing G.o.d. Eldrich, amoral, mad-the throaty battle cackle of the unleashed fiend. We fled.

We stumbled back into the house, and I made us tea while Kat talked to me and candidly confided that what she was experiencing "must be what it is like to be insane." She described having very frank hallucinations with her eyes open, strange "tangible" fern and orchid-like forms were growing and twisting out of every available surface. The previous sensation of heat continued, but it had changed into a field of white-hot potential energy that could be held away from burning contact with her body only by allowing the hallucinogenic energy to spend itself in a chaos of weird and explicit images. Only by applied concentration could she hold the burning plasma at bay a few feet away from her, where it became a skin of vision that encompa.s.sed everything else. After a few minutes of this Kat again seemed to be fading, and so we drew a cold bath and she lay in that for awhile until the symptoms again abated.