True Hallucinations Part 4

it the lama who taught me Tibetan, who would have been asleep a mile away. In the fluid I saw him, in the company of a monk I had never seen; they were looking into a mirrored plate. Then I realized that they were watching me! I could not understand it. I looked away from the fluid and away from my companion, so intense was her aura of strangeness.

Then I realized that we had been singing and yodeling and uttering wild o.r.g.a.s.mic howls for what must have been several minutes on my roof! It meant everyone in Boudanath would have been awakened and was about to open their doors and windows and demand to know what was going on. And what was going on? My grandfather's favorite expostulation seemed appropriate: "Great G.o.d! said the woodc.o.c.k when the hawk struck him." This grotesquely inappropriate recollection brought uncontrollable laughter.

Then the thought of discovery sobered me enough to realize that we must get away from this exposed place. Both of us were completely naked, and the scene around us was one of total, unex-plainable chaos. She was lying down, unable to rise, so I picked her up and made my way down the narrow staircase, past the grain storage bins and into my room.

The whole time I remember saying over and over to her and to myself: "I am a human being. I am a human being." I had to rea.s.sure myself, for I was not at that moment sure.

We waited in my room many minutes. Slowly we realized that by some miracle no less strange than everything else that had occurred, no one was awake demanding to know what was going on. No one seemed even to have heard! To calm us, I made tea and, as I did this, I was able to a.s.sess my companion's state of mind. She seemed quite delirious, quite unable to discuss with me what had happened only a few moments before on the roof. It is an effect typical of Datura that whatever one experiences is very difficult, indeed usually impossible, to recollect later. It seemed that while what had transpired had involved the most intimate of acts between two people, I was nevertheless the only witness who could remember anything at all of what had happened.

Pondering all of this, I crept back to the roof and collected my gla.s.ses. Incredibly, they were unbroken, although I had distinctly heard them shatter. Obsidian liquids, the ectoplasmic excrescences

of tantric hanky-panky, were nowhere to be seen. With my gla.s.ses and our clothes, I returned to my room where my companion was sleeping. I smoked a little has.h.i.+sh and then climbed into the mosquito net and lay down beside her. In spite of all the excitement and the stimulation of my system, I immediately went to sleep. I have no idea how long I slept. When I awoke it was with a start and from a deep slumber. It was still dark. And there was no sign of my friend, I felt a stab of alarm; if she was delirious then it would be dangerous for her to be wandering alone around the village at night. I jumped up and threw on my jalaba and began to search. She was not on the roof, nor near the grain storage bins.

I found her on the ground floor of my building. She was sitting on the earthen floor staring at her reflection in the gas tank of a motorcycle, which belonged to the miller's son-in-law. Still disoriented in the way that is typical of Datura, she was hallucinating persons not present and mistaking one person for another. "Are you my tailor?" she asked me several times as I led her back to my room. "Are you my tailor?"

When we were once again upstairs in my quarters, I took off my jalaba, and we both discovered that I was wearing what she delicately described as her "knickers." They were too small on me and neither of us knew how they had come to be there. This little cross- dressing episode capped an amazing evening, and I roared with laughter. I returned her knickers and we went to bed, puzzled, rea.s.sured, exhausted, and amused.

As this experience pa.s.sed behind us, the girl and I became even closer friends. We never made love again; it was not really the relations.h.i.+p that suited us. She remembered nothing of the events on the roof. About a week after all this was over, I told her my impression of what had happened. She was amazed but accepting. I did not know what had happened. I christened the obsidian fluid we had generated "luv," something more than love, something less than love, perhaps not love at all, but some kind of unplumbed potential human experience very little is known about.

This is the story I told Dennis and Ev that night at La Chorrera as our hammocks swung in the lamplight and the intermittent rain beat down on the thatched roof of the knoll house. It was this incident that had kindled my interest in the violet fluids that ayahuasca shamans are said to generate on the surface of their skins and to use to divine and cure.

Whenever I tell this story, it is the phenomenon of the liquid that I stress. That was what I accentuated to rea.s.sure Dennis that foggy night. I did not tell the absurd part about waking up wearing someone else's drawers. It was d.a.m.ned embarra.s.sing and contributed nothing to the story. At that time I had never told anyone that part of the incident; it was a personal memory. I mention this because that absurd incident was later to become the focus of an instance of telepathy that was the most convincing I have ever witnessed.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

A VIOLET PSYCHOFLUID In which Dennis begins to outline his approach to the Alchemical Opus and a psychofluid that may or may not be translinguistic matter is debated.

My STORY FINISHED, we all went to sleep for a few fitful hours. In the dim light of dawn, Ev and I made our way to a cl.u.s.ter of huts about three-quarters of a mile away on the sh.o.r.e of the Igara-Parana above the chorro. We knew that Witoto, coming down the river to the mission to deliver their children to school, would be staying in those normally empty houses. Our hope was to buy some eggs, papayas, or squash to supplement our diet of brown rice, yucca, and plantains.

We found only a small group of people whose only item for sale was a grapefruit-sized, green, heart-shaped fruit filled with slimy, vaguely sweet seeds awash in a light, purple syrup. At the time this fruit was unknown to science; a few years later Schultes would describe it and name it Macoubea witotorum. I have yet to encounter this fruit again. It was very inexpensive and since we had come with the expectation of buying something we spent fifteen pesos and got nearly fifty pounds of this curious food. Even though I had been up most of the night plying the hallucinogenic oceans of

mind, I felt fit and full of vitality. I hoisted a bulging costal-our entire buy-and set off back toward the mission at a brisk pace.

I enjoyed this ch.o.r.e. The costal seemed light, almost a pleasure to carry along. Without pause, even to rest for a moment, Ev and I returned to the mission and to Vanessa and Dave's riverside residence for our breakfast in common. When we had left our hut in search of food, Dennis had been deeply asleep, but he was up now and had apparently gone immediately to awaken Vanessa and describe to her his experiences of a few hours previous. The interior buzzing sound, the feeling of being possessed-it was all being excitedly told as we arrived at the house and I set down my load. Throughout the making of breakfast the events of the last evening were discussed and dissected. Vanessa and Dave were unmoved by Dennis's excited a.s.sertion that some extremely peculiar energy field had been tapped into and verified. At the end of breakfast I suggested to Dennis that, rather than arguing with people about the nature of the experience, he should go off by himself and write down all that he thought about the strange sound that he had made. He accepted this advice and made his way back up the hill to the knoll house to be alone and to write: February 28,1971 I approach these pages with a peculiar sense of urgency as a man might who had confronted an unexplainable phenomenon as some impossible creation of dreams or unaccountable natural principle. The task facing such a man would be a very subtle one; that is, to describe the phenomenon as accurately as possible. My task is compounded by the fact that the phenomenon I must try to describe has itself to do with the very tools of description; i.e., language. This rather peculiar statement will begin to make more sense as we explore the concept more fully.

Before going further, something tells me it is necessary to consider who I am. Twenty- four hours ago I thought I knew-now this has become the most perplexing question I have ever been confronted with. The questions leading from it will provide the answers that will allow us to understand and use the phenomenon which is so difficult to describe.

These may be the last characters of

a crude language that I will ever apply to the description of anything; since the phenomenon begins at the edge of language, where the concept-forming faculty gropes but finds no words, I must be careful to avoid not distinguis.h.i.+ng between mere language- symbol-metaphor and the reality I am attempting to apply it to.

When I read this prologue later, it seemed to me both grandiose and alarming, but Dennis had an aura of calm cert.i.tude that seemed to command respect. I felt that the Logos was struggling with the vocabulary of its newest vessel. He seemed to be making more and more sense, to be on to something. I read on: Since any phenomenon is, to a point, describable in empirical terms, so too with this one.

It has to do with controlling one's body chemistry in such a way as to produce very specific vocal and au-dial phenomena: the state becomes possible when highly bio- dynamic vegetable alkaloids, specifically tryptamines and MAO-inhibitors,* are introduced into the body under very carefully regulated parameters. This phenomenon is apparently possible in the presence of tryptamines alone, though MAO inhibition definitely helps to trigger it by facilitating tryptamine absorption. The phenomenon has now been triggered by two people within our immediate group: Terence has been experimenting with vocal phenomena under the influence of DMT for some years now.+ Until last night, when I triggered and experienced this sound wave for a few brief seconds under the influence of nineteen Stropharia mushrooms, Terence was the only person I knew who claimed ability to perform this sound. But last night, after [* MAO-inhibitors are chemical compounds whose activity in the body slows down or interferes with Mono Amine Oxidase, an enzyme system that oxidizes many compounds in foods and drugs into harmless byproducts. In the presence of MAO-inhibitors, compounds that would normally be metabolized into inactive by-products instead have the duration of their physiological and psychological activity extended.

+My experiments had consisted of having observed that the spontaneous glos-solalia that DMT caused in myself sometimes triggered a kind of seizure of synesthesia in which syntactical structures, spoken language, actually became visible. Some effect such as this may have been behind my rooftop experience in Nepal. Unusual linguistic and vocal displays seem to typify DMT intoxication.]

ingesting the mushrooms, we lay waiting in our hammocks; the heavy poisoned feeling that commonly pa.s.ses briefly over the limbs at the beginning of the Stropharia visions had by this time pa.s.sed completely. It had given way, in me at least, to a warm suffusion of contentment and good feeling that actually seemed to burn away somewhere inside of me. Such feelings I have had before, both on mushrooms and just after DMT flashes.

Then we began to discuss people far away and how we might attempt to contact them fourth-dimensionally; since apparently magical connection at a distance is a concern of shamanism this was not such a strange rap for us. But it was definitely at some point in time near to that conversation that I first heard the sound, immeasurably distant and faint, in the region between the ears, not outside, but definitely, incredibly there, perfectly distinct on the absolute edge of audible perception. A sound almost like a signal or very, very faint transmissions of radio buzzing from somewhere, something like tingling chimes at first, but gradually becoming amplified into a snapping, popping, gurgling, cracking electrical sound. I tried to imitate these noises with my vocal chords, just experimenting with a kind of humming, buzzing vocal sound made deep in the throat.

Suddenly, it was as if the sound and my voice locked onto each other and the sound was my voice-but coming out of me in such a way that no human voice could possibly distort itself the way mine was doing. The sound was suddenly much intensified in energy and was like the sound of a giant insect.

While Dennis wrote, the rest of us swam indolently in the river and washed our laundry under a clear, infinitely blue, and empty Amazonian sky. The background drone of the cicadas would occasionally rise in a coherent wave and sweep over the warm and s.h.i.+ning surface of the gently drifting Igara-Parana, falling like electricity across the land in the heat of the equatorial day.

Late that afternoon, Dennis came back down to the edge of the river looking for me. He found me was.h.i.+ng out my tennis shoes on a large, flat rock that the s.h.i.+fting height of the river had conveniently exposed just a foot or so above the water line. Doubtless

whenever it was so exposed it served as the favorite local laundry spot. It was a magic spot, but its magic at that moment was still fourteen days into the future. There we sat and talked. It had been about sixteen hours since the previous evening's episode with the strange sound. Dennis said that the writing exercise had been very useful.

"Great! And so what have you come up with?"

"I'm not sure. I'm very excited, but whatever it is that's the cause of my excitement is also developing ideas in my mind nearly faster than I can write them down."

"Ideas? What sort of ideas?" "Funny ideas. Ideas about how we can use this effect, or this stuff, or whatever it is. My intuition is that it is related to the psy-chofluids that Michael Harner reported in the July 1969 issue of Natural History and to what happened to you in Boudanath. Remember how Harner implied that ayahuasqueros vomited a magical substance that was the basis of their ability to divine? This is like that, some sort of translinguistic stuff made with the voice."

We talked at length there by the river's edge, ranging over the options and the possibilities. He was insistent in linking my experience in Nepal with a very strange phenomenon that occurred in Jivaro shamanism in Ecuador. The people take ayahuasca after which they, and anyone else who has taken ayahuasca, are able to see a substance that is described as violet or deep blue and that bubbles like a liquid. When you vomit from taking ayahuasca, this violet fluid comes out of your body; it also forms on the surface of the skin, like sweat. The Jivaro do much of their magic with this peculiar stuff.

These matters are extremely secret. Informants insist that the shamans spread the stuff out on the ground in front of them, and that one can look at this material and see other times and other places. According to their reports, the nature of this fluid is completely outside of ordinary experience: it is made out of s.p.a.ce/time or mind, or it is pure hallucination objectively expressed but always keeping itself within the confines of a liquid.

Harner's work among the Jivaro did not stand alone. Since the beginnings of ethnographic reporting out of the Amazon there have been rumors and unconfirmed reports of magical excrement and

magically empowered psychophysical objects generated out of the human body using hallucinogens and song. I recalled the alchemical observation that the secret is hidden in feces.

"Matter that is hyperdimensional and therefore translinguistic? Is that what you mean?" I asked Dennis.

"Yes. Whatever that means, but something like that, I suppose. Gad! Why not? I mean it's pretty nuts, but it's also the symbol system we brought with us running into the shamanic magic that we came here looking for. 'This is what you s.h.i.+pped for, man, to chase the White Whale over all sides of ocean and both sides of earth till he spout black blood and roll fin out.' Isn't that your rap?"

The resort to Melvillian rhetoric was unexpected and not like him. Where did he get this stuff? "Yes, I suppose."

"But here is the thing; if there is something weird going on, then we should observe it and see what it is and try to reduce it to some coherent framework. Granted we don't know what it is that we are dealing with, but on the other hand, we know that we came here to investigate shamanic magic generally, so now we have to go to work on this effect, or whatever it is, and just hope that we know what we are doing and have enough data to crack it. We are too isolated to do anything else, and to ignore it might be to squander a golden opportunity."

"Yes, you're right," I said. "So here we are, very much on the brink of deep water. We are having something like beginner's luck, you know, finding the 'Other' so accessible. The mushroom is doing this, or the mushroom and the ayahuasca smoking-it is hard to be sure. So many variables. There is a lot of synchronistic activity as well."

"Right. I feel on the brink of something tremendous. We must just observe our active fantasy closely and try to ride herd on what is developing. The good old Jungian method, that's all."

"Yes," I said, "ideally all of this could be distilled down to the point where some sort of test of the validity of the effect could somehow be set up."

I recalled that there is an instance in The Teachings of Don Juan where the Peyote ent.i.ty, Mescalito, holds up his hand, and in its palm Carlos Castaneda sees a past incident in his life.

If this phenomenon has any empirical validity, perhaps what happens is that a very thin film of this projection-sensitive transdi-mensional goo is present. And when you look at it, it is like perfect feedback. It is a mirror-not of your physical reflection but of who you are. All this lays in the realm of speculation, of course. Does this stuff exist? Or is it just hallucination? Who can believe in a thing like that?

Dennis felt strongly that it was connected with sound. One could either stabilize the stuff or cause it to appear by doing something with one's voice. It was a strange, slippery idea because one could extrapolate it infinitely, since whatever it was, it was made of the very stuff of imagination itself. If one shaped this stuff in three dimensions, it could be anything, yet this violet ectoplasmic mental liquid must only exist in the fourth dimension. It seemed possible to suppose that one might pierce the other dimension and have this fluid come boiling out. Flubber for eggheads. Mental silly putty. He talked a lot about it. I was ecstatic; I thought his ideas were wonderful. I felt it was yet another idea from the tryptamine ocean that had floated up into our nets. The question was: What could we do with it?

Recalling it now, having learned so much in the intervening twenty years, it is hard to be sure just what we did believe at La Chorrera, just what level of sophistication we did achieve. Our mood was one of lightness and delight, the several mushroom experiences in that remote and beautiful place leading us to a gently swelling euphoria. It was a very happy time. We were excited with the prospect of actually grappling under near perfect conditions with "the Secret," as we called it then, meaning the spectrum of effects encountered in tryptamine-induced ecstasy. These had become the compa.s.s and the vehicle of our quest: the rose window topologies of the galacterian beehives of the di- methyltryptamine flash, that nexus of cheap talk and formal mathematics where wishes became horses and everybody got to ride. We were not unused to the idea of the Other, but we had only glimpsed it in brief flashes and in its manifestation as the lux natura, the spiritual radiance behind organic nature. We were in that moment the fans of the G.o.ddess, not yet her lovers.

Everyone in our small expedition felt, I think, the sense of something opening around us, of the suspension of time, of turning

and turning in a widening green world that was strangely and almost erotically alive, surrounding us for thousands of miles. The jungle as mind, the world hanging in s.p.a.ce as mind-images of order and sentient organization came crowding in on all sides. How small we were, knowing little, yet fiercely proud of what we knew, and feeling ourselves somehow the representatives of humanity meeting something strange and Other, something at the edge of human experience since the very beginning. A proud and eerie grandeur seemed mixed with our enterprise as those first days at La Chorrera went by.

The next day, the first of March, pa.s.sed uneventfully. Dennis worked on his journal. I collected insects, and Vanessa photographed around the mission. At evening we were all gathered again at the edge of the knoll where our small lodging stood. In silent communion with each other and the river, Ev and I sat looking out over the lake.

It was Ev who noticed it first. The lake beneath the chorro was flecked with foam generated by the rush of water through the narrow channel. The foam floating on the brown water served to mark the currents of the river as it widened into the lake and continued on the other side. It was at this that Ev exclaimed. After several minutes of watching the water, a change had suddenly stolen over the moving, marbled surface at the far side of the river. The water there appeared to have stopped. Just that, just simply to have stopped moving. The surface appeared frozen, yet the near half of the river was seen to continue as before.

Dennis and Vanessa were called out of the hut, and they agreed that the effect was remarkable. I wandered away as they began to speculate on the causes-the time of day, the light conditions, optical illusions, and all the rest. I seemed to have no heart for these arguments; each time they broke out, I found myself with some deep, inner a.s.surance that the situation was moving forward just as it should and that everyone was playing a part and doing it very well.

This mood of calm and insightful resignation was something new to me, perhaps enhanced by the taking of the mushrooms, but it had developed during the month in Colombia preceding our trek into the jungle. A few weeks earlier, I would have partic.i.p.ated in these sorts of discussions; now I let them take their own course. As I walked, I looked for a place to sit down-Dennis had offered me his journal entry for that day to read: March 1,1971 Last night I again triggered the phenomenon after having eaten one mushroom and smoking gra.s.s. It was almost identical to the first experience-a lifting, pulsing wave of vocal buzzing growing loud very quickly and picking up shock energy as it did so.

Though I could have prolonged the sound beyond a brief burst, I did not because of the energy. I am certain that soon it will become possible to trigger the sound completely without tryptamines or other drugs. It is becoming easier to plug-in on each time, and I feel now that it is accessible at any time. It is clearly a learned activity that tryptamines can initiate and trigger, but it can happen without tryptamines once it is understood and mastered. We have thus far been able to establish the existence of peculiar vocal phenomena in two individuals subject to similar experimental controls. We must now attempt to understand what it is that the phenomenon could be. We must perform experiments with the sound and from our results develop theories to understand the processes at work. Terence has experimented with these sounds far more than anyone else (and I am the only other that I know of), and he has discovered some interesting things.

Things such as that the normally invisible syntactical web that holds both language and the world together can condense or change its ontological status and become visible.

Indeed there seems to be a parallel mental dimension in which everything is made of the stuff of visible language, a kind of universe next door inhabited by elves that sing themselves into existence and invite those who encounter them to do the same.

The DMT-initiated state, which allows prolonged bursts of this vocal energy, he describes as being one of seeing the levels of sound become more dense as they finally materialize into small, gnome-like, machine-like creatures made of material like obsidian froth, which pours from the body, mouth, and s.e.x organs as long as the

sound continues. It is effervescent, phosph.o.r.escent, and indescribable. Here is where the linguistic metaphors become useless, for what the material actually is is supra-linguistic matter; it is a language, but not made of words-a language which becomes and which is the things it describes. It is a more perfect archetypal Logos. We are convinced that through experimentation with these vocal phenomena, with and without the aid of drugs, it will be possible to understand and use trans linguistic matter to accomplish any reality, for to say anything in this voice is to cause that thing to happen!

Non-chemists ourselves at that point, we had been able to turn the condensation of spirit into the idea of translinguistic matter. Word, object, and cognition had become fused in the best tradition of the higher Tantric yogas. My brother was in the grip of a revelation of the alchemical mystery in the most traditional sense.

Such a rash statement would be outlandish if it were not for our long and tedious speculations on the matter. Our studies in the chemistry of mind, the metabolism of tryptamine, the nature of thought, of consciousness, history, magic, shamanism, quantum and relativistic physics, metamorphosis in insects, alchemical processes, etc., together with the intuitive understanding of acausal and synchronistic events that we are deriving from the Stropharia, allows us to venture a not entirely wild guess as to what this sound which takes form may be. Hallucinogens, by effecting the neural matrix, can produce changes in consciousness in the temporal dimension. Clearly, consciousness can work changes in three dimensions as well. On tryptamines it is possible, under special conditions, to hear and vocalize a sound that turns through a higher dimensional manifold and condenses as translinguistic matter, i.e., matter reduplicated upon itself through time, much as a hologram is reduplicated through s.p.a.ce. The substance whose appearance the sounds initiate is tryptamine metabolized by mind through a higher spatial dimension. It is a hyperdimen-sional molecule carrying its trip on the outside of itself in "this" world.

The hyperdimensional nature of this material is such that it is all material, concepts, events, words, people, and ideas

h.o.m.ogenized into one thing via the higher dimensional alchemy of mind.

This is the idea of the mysterious magical phlegm, the legend of which survives on the less-traveled side tributaries of the Amazon. There, persistent rumors circulate of a magical material, generated out of one's body by master shamans, that allows one to cure, work magic, and obtain information unavailable by any normal means. Like the magic mirrors familiar from fairy tales, the magical fluids of rainforest rumor are windows on distant times and places. Our task was to create a credible model of how such a phenomenon could operate without leaving the known or suspected laws of physics and chemistry far behind. It was a real challenge. Dennis speculated in his journal: Many questions occur concerning the phenomenology of this temporal hologram as fluid matrix. We speculate it is hyperdimen-sionally metabolized tryptamine-an alchemical phenomenon which is a correct union of tryptamine (a compound nearly ubiquitous in organic nature), with vocally produced sound mediated by mind. It is the mind that directs this process, and that direction consists of a harmonic atunement to an interiorized audio-linguistic phenomenon which may be an electron-spin resonance "tone" of the psilocybin molecule. When this tone is locked in on- a process which consists of vocally imitating the interior tone to perfection, the hyperdimensional tryptamine is produced. Is this substance mental as an idea is mental? Is it as real as an ordinary liquid, like water? Harner insisted that Jivaro shamans under the influence of MAO-inhibiting tryptamine plus Banisteri-opsis caapi (ayahuasca) infusions produce a fluorescent liquid by means of which they accomplish all of their magic. Though invisible to ordinary perception, this fluid is said to be visible to anyone who has ingested the brew. Ayahuasca is frequently a.s.sociated with violet auras and deep blue hallucinations. This may indicate a thermal plasma, perhaps only visible in the UVspectrum. If this phenomenon is found to fall into the category "mental," indicated above, functioning as described, but with the limitation of not being tangential to ordinary s.p.a.ce/time, it will

still represent perfected understanding of the hyperdimension Jung named the collective unconscious.

Looking back from the vantage point of over twenty years, these notes seem both arcane and naive. The idea of a possible unitary metamorphosis of the mental and physical worlds is counterintuitive and conceptually difficult, yet the belief that something real lies behind this phenomenon, or the idea of it, was a central factor in leading us to explore the shamanism of the Amazon Basin. At the time when I first read these notes, I doubted what I read. It seemed to go against the grain of common sense; I could not really understand them. Today, after years of education pushed toward understanding the events at La Chorrera, these ideas seem as magically near and yet as far away as they did then. We had a theory and we had an experience, and we soon decided to try to link them through an experiment whose results would have been preposterous unless there were some seed of operational truth in the bizarre ideas born in that period.

Later that same evening, Ev, Dennis, and I smoked a joint of Santa Marta Gold before turning in. It was a calm, perfectly clear night when we sat down and began this ritual. Ev commented on the clarity of the night, and we all stared for a moment out into the galaxy.

The night was awash with millions of stars. We smoked in awed silence. Perhaps five minutes went by, each of the three of us lost in our own ideas. The reverie ended with Dennis's exclamation.

"Look how quickly the air conditions have changed. Now there is a ground fog just springing up."

It was true. For about seventy feet in all directions there was a thick fog, only a few feet deep, hugging the ground. Even as we watched, the condition thickened and spread outward, becoming finally a general fog over the whole area. We had come from depth- less, clear night sky to dense fog in a few minutes. I was frankly amazed. Dennis was the first to offer an explanation, with a certainty that seemed as puzzling as the thing itself: "It's some kind of barometric instability that our burning joint was able to push over some critical threshold."

"You must be putting me on!" I said. "You're saying that the heat from our joint started water condensing into visible fog right near us and that that was like a chain-reaction to all of the supersaturated air nearby? You can't be serious!"

"No, no. That's it! And what's more, this is happening for a reason, or rather something, perhaps the mushroom, is using it as an example. It is a way of showing us that small instabilities in a system can trigger large general fluctuations."

"Hoo-boy."

This rap of Dennis's unsettled me. I could not imagine that his explanation was correct or exactly why he thought it made sense.* It pa.s.sed through my mind for the first time that he might be s.p.a.cing out mentally. I used no psychoa.n.a.lytical jargon in thinking about it, but I noted a reaction in myself that included the idea that he might be unfolding into a mythopoetic reality, or as I thought of it then, "going bananas."

By this time the fog was impenetrable, and we all retired for the night, but not before Ev related that in the silence before the appearance of the fog she had a hallucination. With her eyes closed, she saw a strange, elf-like creature rolling a complicated polyhedron along the ground. Each facet of this polyhedron seemed, she said, like a window onto another place in time or another world.

"It's the stone!" I breathed. I could almost see her vision of the lapis philosophorum-the glittering goal of centuries of alchemical and Hermetic speculation glimpsed in the Amazonian night, now seeming a great multi-dimensional jewel, the philosopher's stone, in the keeping of a telluric gnome. The power of the image was deep and touching. I seemed to feel the spiritual dreams of the old alchemists, the puffers great and small, who had sought the lapis in the cloudy swirling of their alembics. I could feel the golden chain of adepts reaching back into the distant h.e.l.lenistic past, the Hermetic Opus, a project vaster than empires and centuries; nothing less than the redemption of fallen humanity through the respiritu-alization of matter. I had never seen or imagined the mystery of the stone thus, but in listening to Ev's description of what she had seen, an image formed in my mind that to this day remains with [* Of course, none of us could have known that much of the mathematical research of the decades ahead would explore just such ideas under the name of chaos theory and dynamics.]

me. It is the image of the philosopher's stone as hyperdimensional jewel-become-UFO- the human soul as stars.h.i.+p. It is the universal panacea at the end of time, all history being the shock wave of this final actualization of the potential in the human psyche. These thoughts, these reveries, seemed to me then like the stirring of something vast, something dimly sensed that was stretched out over millions of years, something about the destiny of humankind and the return of the soul to its awesome and hidden source. What was happening to us? The sense of the peculiar was nearly palpable. Dark oceans of time and s.p.a.ce seemed to swell and flow beneath our feet. The image of the earth hanging in s.p.a.ce was everywhere emotionally superimposed on the situation around us. And what was that situation really?

I lay in my hammock, thrilled and uneasy at the edge of sleep, then I fell into deep sleep and deep dreams from which nothing remained in the morning save the sense of yawning interstellar s.p.a.ce.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

THE OPUS CLARIFIED.

In which Dennis reveals his strategy for commencing the Great Work.

The MORNING OF MARCH 2, 1971, dawned crystalline and hot at La Chorrera. It was the much antic.i.p.ated day when Ev, Dennis, and I would at last be able to take possession of the house in the forest, which was finally being vacated. This particular morning there was more than the usual amount of excitement a.s.sociated with our frequent moves. For three days, ever since the glossolalia episode of the twenty-seventh, Dennis had been saying that the energy of the phenomenon was so great that we should not go any further unless we had the greater isolation that the forest house provided.