True Hallucinations Part 7

We all looked at each other, glossy pubic hair and secret genitals now resplendent in the suns.h.i.+ne. I rolled a joint and we sat in a circle and smoked. We told Dave and Vanessa about the teaching and they tried it-with varying degrees of success. Dave seemed to think it worked, skeptical Vanessa was not so sure. I was not surprised at this result since a voice in the head is a very slippery and subjective thing. If one has it, there is no doubt; if one does not have it, it seems a very murky matter.

Everyone was very amiable, except that Dennis was showing a tendency to talk right through other people's comments as though they were not present. It seemed as if he were on a different time-track from the rest of us, since he really seemed unable to realize when someone else was talking.

We thought that it was logical to untie our hammocks from the house, to take them and nothing else, and to go naked into the jungle. We would tie the hammocks in a tree and get in. Then we would explore the mode, because clearly you could do more than ask questions. The door was standing open. Experiment alone would show what one could do. Once we had moved, I asked the thing in my head what should be done and received instructions that we should visualize our lives starting from the present, and then move back through our entire life, encountering and setting things right with every sentient creature that we had ever wronged. When we reached the end of this process, we would leave our bodies and somehow enter into the dimension of absolute freedom, which now seemed so near. I conceived of this as though it were a fast rewind of the recording of karmic activity. Once one's karma was rewound a state of original innocence would naturally flower.

Lying in our hammocks, we set out to meditate our way into hypers.p.a.ce. In my mind's eye, I could see myself at La Chorrera and then going down the trail to El Encanto, up the river to Leguizamo and back to Bogota, back to Canada. At each point I would meet the people that I had lived my life with and I would say, "We got it! I'm sorry. I hope I didn't offend you too much back in 3-D. It's all over now. Just all over."

I could see people. Immediately, I reached out for all of them. "We're on the Amazon," I explained to each. "And now we are going home. Or some place." The vision had an utterly bizarre, real quality. Tears welled up behind my closed eyelids. It was very peculiar.

The voice of the teacher spoke in my mind. "You've found it. This is it. It's all over now.

There is no more. Within a few hours, the superstructure of earthbound, human civilization is going to collapse and your species will depart. First you will go to Jupiter and then to Alpha in Sagittarius. A day of high adventure dawns at last for the human beings."

At first the images seemed to be deepening and growing more intense, but after an hour it was clear that they were actually fading. One by one we pulled ourselves out of the stupor that the morning heat and being in our hammocks had induced. We began talking and talking, a.n.a.lyzing and a.n.a.lyzing. Dennis seemed the most out of it. Dave and Vanessa were uncertain that anything at all had "really" happened. Ev was distant, and I was feeling definitely stoned and immersed in the surreal perception that had been mine since the chaotic opening of the day.

Then I realized that something was wrong. Apprehension was outrunning reality, as it always does. For everyone else, nothing had happened. As we talked, it came out that no one could hear Dennis in their mind except me. And actually, they were all wondering what was going on, growing more alarmed as they couldn't help but conclude that I was losing my mind. We were entering what I later came to view as the next phase, which was a period of confusion for all. Dennis was definitely disengaged from reality. I would talk to him and he wouldn't know he was being spoken to. He broke into conversations because he didn't know anyone else was speaking. As the gulf between our perceptions became clear, we all felt the need to return to normal, to touch the basics; a visit to the priest's outdoor shower was suggested and seized upon, since we were all filthy and covered with the grime of the night's fire tending.

We gathered up our scattered clothing. During this effort, we discovered that Dennis had thrown his gla.s.ses away along with his boots and everything else. Disheveled and disoriented, we retraced the path to the mission, searching unsuccessfully for the lost pair of gla.s.ses.

A group of Witoto gazed at us as we pa.s.sed and then roared with appreciative laughter.

"They know. They know what has been

done," the voice in my head a.s.sured me. They were certainly beaming and chortling about something. On we walked toward the mission and its shower in the suns.h.i.+ne.

Dennis wouldn't stop talking, and it was really no longer possible to communicate with him. Consensus among the others was building that we had a crisis on our hands, but it wasn't out of control yet. I agreed with them that ayahuasca was very peculiar, and they thought that the pa.s.sage of a few hours would smooth everything out. My conclusion was that something real and unantic.i.p.ated had happened, that Dennis had done something, and that some kind of odd pharmacological effect had been unwittingly manipulated. But the effect had behaved only in part as we had expected, and so we were cast we knew not where. I was calm and could at least partic.i.p.ate in the social situation. Though I was moved by emotions that sent tears of joy streaming down my face, I wasn't out of touch with reality.

"We'll wait for tomorrow. Dennis will come down," I tried to rea.s.sure the rest of the group.

Everyone seemed to be finding their way back to their normal psychic equilibrium save Dennis and myself. While I was burdened with odd but wonderfully expanded perceptions, his wandering ideas and wild eyes indicated that he was having real difficulty getting his feet on the ground. After our shower, on the way back to the forest, I mentioned all of these things to him, but acting as sly as Hamlet in his madness, he replied in riddles and with the mimicry of dead relatives. I could get nothing out of him; I continued to a.s.sume that a night's sleep would set him right. When we returned to camp, I insisted that he lie down, which he did.

"Now can we call the press conference?" he inquired from his hammock, as the rest of us moved about trying to reestablish order.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

IN THE VORTEX.

In which we discover that the Universe is stranger than we can suppose, Dennis makes a shamanic journey, and our group is polarized and divided.

To SPARE VANESSA THE WALK back to the river we decided that she and Dave would stay the night at our hut. Their two hammocks were hung next to our three. It was crowded, but we dined well that evening, and except for the occasional oblique or incomprehensible comment from Dennis, the surface of things seemed to have been restored. Vanessa's ankle remained bad, and much attention was directed toward this difficulty, perhaps due to its palpable nature in contrast to most of what was going on. I still felt utterly changed and made new, both removed from everyone and content to let events unfold as they would. I was a.s.sured by the new thing inside of me that however odd things appeared all was very, very well.

The last rave of this long, amazing day came after dinner in the firelight. From his hammock Dennis broke the silence to explain that this night in our dreams we would learn a series of things that would end with us severing our connection to our bodies long before morning. We would rea.s.semble in our perfected, virtual bodies on the bridge of a stars.h.i.+p that was in geo-synchronous...o...b..t twenty-two thousand miles above the Amazon Basin.

This was the second self-limiting prophecy that had been made since the experiment, the first being that morning's effort to meditate backward to one's birth. In retrospect I now see that this "eschatological hysteria" was one of the chief ways in which my thinking seemed radically different. Over the next weeks and years there would be many more of these self-testing prophecies, many scenarios of the possible way the world might undergo final, total, and complete eschatological transformation. Like Old Testament prophets or h.e.l.lenistic alchemists, we felt that we were caught up in a cosmic drama of fall and redemption.

Four days from the experiment, five, seven, ten, sixteen, twenty-one, forty, sixty-four- all were times awaited with hope and willful suspension of disbelief and all came and went with the eschaton still all-pervading, yet still very elusive. The idea of a dimension- roving lens vehicle, once articulated, was never far away. It haunted Dennis's and my waking fantasy, our secret hopes, and our nightly dreams.

Dennis's statement about the awaiting stars.h.i.+p was also the first appearance of the UFO image in his thought since the experiment, a theme to be articulated in a thousand ways in the days that followed. The equation lapis = self = UFO was the operating a.s.sumption of Dennis's long voyage of self-discovery and return. With these images of death-in-sleep and rebirth-inside-a-stars.h.i.+p ringing in our minds, we turned in, thoroughly exhausted.

I stress that the hut was crowded, with hammocks strung from every available beam. It was difficult to move about without jostling one's neighbors through the tugging and twisting of the many ropes. We must have retired around ten o'clock. I slept soundly until sometime many hours later, which I took to be after two or so. I rose to take the traditional middle of the night p.i.s.s that the use of condensed milk induces in explorers.

Sitting up in my hammock, I struggled for matches and lit a candle. In the silent night I heard the inrush of my own exclamation of amazement. An intense, triple-layered corona of light was s.h.i.+mmering out from the candle flame for a distance of about four feet. A deep, iridescent blue alternated with an equally pure orange. I was immediately reminded

of the aura of light that surrounds the body of the resurrected Christ in the painting by Matthias Grunewald. I understood that Grunewald must have seen the same thing that I was seeing now and later incorporated it into his "resurrection."

Simultaneously, as though I was having a yet deeper thought, I somehow intuitively "understood" that the distortion or polarizing of the light of the flame was an effect caused by the distortion of psychic s.p.a.ce-time induced by our experiment and the nearby, ubiquitous presence of the lapis. This thought was followed by another: Perhaps the temporal and spatial distance from the stone could be gauged by the intensity of the colors in the aura of light around a simple candle. The distortion of light from a candle might act as a detector of the philosopher's stone. I recalled Diogenes prospecting for the good with a lantern. Was that what he was doing? I thought of the phrase, "It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness," and laughed.

I awakened Ev and she sleepily confirmed the colors around the candle, but it communicated nothing to her of what it communicated to me. She rolled over, and when I returned from going outside, she was snoring softly. As I climbed back into my hammock, I counted heads and noted that everyone was present and asleep. I lay awake a long time, thinking. All seemed still.

As breakfast unfolded the following morning, the sixth of March, it became clear that the restful sleep I had imagined we had all shared had been anything but that. From Dennis, still disorganized but expansive, comments emerged that he had, or imagined he had, a very active night. Upon close questioning, it came out that he was completely convinced that sometime during the night he had arisen and dressed and then had a series of nocturnal adventures. These involved going alone in the darkness to the thundering immensity of the chorro over a mile away, then returning to climb and spend some time in a large tree near the edge of the mission, then making his way back across the pasture and returning to his hammock, strung among all the others. The thought of him wandering around during the night on those trails, without his gla.s.ses, falling in and out of shamanic ecstasy, perhaps howling and otherwise paleolithically comporting himself, was too much for me. It was a breech of the collective cool. Even though I was 90 percent

certain that it had never really happened, I was determined to eliminate all possibility of such rambles in the future.

Dennis's story was the cla.s.sic description of a shamanic night journey. He said that he had gone to the chorro and had meditated in the mission cemetery we had visited before.

He had begun to return to camp when he confronted a particularly large Inga tree near where the path skirted the edge of the mission. On impulse, he had climbed it, aware as he did that the ascent of the world tree is the central motif of the Siberian shamanic journey. As he climbed the tree, he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes, and as he reached the highest point in his ascent, something that he called "the vortex" opened ahead of him-a swirling, enormous doorway into time. He could see the Cyclopean megaliths of Stonehenge and beyond them, revolving at a different speed and at a higher plane, the outlines of the pyramids, gleaming and marble-faceted as they have not been since the days of pharaonic Egypt. And yet farther into the turbulent maw of the vortex, he saw mysteries that were ancient long before the advent of man-t.i.tanic archetypal forms on worlds unimagined by us, the arcane machineries of sentient agencies that swept through this part of the galaxy when our planet was young and its surface barely cooled. This machinery, these gibbering abysses, touched with the cold of interstellar s.p.a.ce and aeon-consuming time, rushed down upon him. He fainted, and time-who can say how much time-pa.s.sed by him.

He next found himself in the pasture a few hundred feet from his newly discovered axis mundi. If he fell from the tree, it did not seem to have hurt him. Amazement, exaltation, fear, and confusion were all present in his thoughts. The continuum seemed to be shredding and ripping itself to pieces before his eyes, time and s.p.a.ce swirling the artifacts of twenty-thousand years of human striving into a vortex of apocalyptic contradictions. In that state of fear and exultation, at the depth of the revelation of humanity's destiny among the stars, Dennis returned to our camp and noiselessly returned to his hammock, or awakened there from a dream of the same thing.

Twenty-four hours had pa.s.sed since the attempt to hyper-carbolate human DNA. It was apparent that Dennis was not pulling out of the induced state of shamanic excitement as quickly as we

had hoped. This was too long to be considered a normal reaction to mushrooms or ayahuasca. Two choices presented themselves to explain the situation: The first was the position that Vanessa and Dave leaned toward, and it said that the strain of the journey and the recent psilo-cybin tripping had contributed to activate a shamanic archetype in Dennis that had been latent all along. This was now overt and carrying a strong transference potential to which I was succ.u.mbing by being unable to recognize my brother's condition as a potentially pathological state. This was the source of much of our differences of opinion on how to proceed.

A second explanation, the one Ev and I leaned toward, took a biochemical rather than a psychological approach. It said that Dennis, through his unusual diet of alkaloids and the experiment he performed, had inhibited some enzyme system that would normally return one from the heights of a hallucinogenic trip, but in this case had somehow become inoperative. The most likely candidate for this would be the monoamine oxidase (or MAO) system, which is responsible for rendering many hallucinogens into inoperative byproducts. The phenomenon of irreversible MAO inhibition is known to occur with some drugs and is a condition that takes nearly two weeks to correct itself. Though the compounds in Banisteriopsis caapi are known to usually reverse their MAO inhibition in four to six hours, as subsequent events show, this explanation was doubtless some part of the story, since Dennis was to be in the grip of his shamanic ravings for nearly two weeks.

After years of thought, my own explanation continues to lean heavily on the second idea for an operational explanation. I do not believe that Dennis was predisposed to an archetypal submergence. I believe that somehow, in a single moment, he bound up all the MAO in his body, and his derangement was due to the lag time that was required to rebuild his MAO level from a complete and sudden inhibition. I believe that this sudden depletion was caused by his experiment and that vocally induced, resonance canceling of the forces that normally operate in these molecules caused major changes in his body chemistry. In short, I believe that he induced an irreversible MAO inhibition in his body through the use of psilo-cybin and his voice and will.

If this is true, then the implication for humankind may be every bit as great as we, in our inflated state of mind, supposed, since it hints at a pharmacological technology by which humankind might explore the parallel continuum whose interaction with our own existence is signified by the visionary experience. We had brushed against an effect that someday may open a door to all the worlds teeming in our dreams and imaginations.

Certainly it is an effect to be studied and learned from. Today, years after the experiment, it still seems full of great promise. My continued interest in these matters is based on the personal belief that some unusual and still unconfirmed effect was at work in our experiment, something like the principle of resonance-canceling that Dennis was so intrigued by.

Breakfast on March 7, the second day following the experiment, was closed with a hot discussion of whether Dennis had really gone to the chorro or only dreamed that he had.

As the rhetoric exhausted itself, Vanessa drew me away from the hut, and we walked along as I went to the spring for water. She wanted to have a talk, the gist of which was that since there were wide differences in diagnosis of what was going on, so there were wide differences concerning what should be done.

"But since Dennis is your brother and you have strong opinions on this subject, I will defer in favor of what you think should be done here. At least for the moment."

I was grateful for the margin of time contained in Vanessa's chosen course. The whole question revolving around Dennis's state of mind concerned how and especially when he would pull out of it. Any diagnosis had to come forth with an operational prediction on that vital point. I was a.s.sured by the inner voice that all was well, but I wanted Vanessa to understand that I appreciated her approach even if I did not agree with it.

I understood from Vanessa's demeanor that we would be left pretty much to ourselves in the forest house. We could expect her and Dave only as visitors, and already the possibility of retreat from the jungle isolation was becoming a faint but growing theme.

Thus the stage was set for the next five days of chaos at La Chorrera, from the seventh to the twelfth of March. From that day onward, Ev became a kind of liaison with the rest of the world of the mission. She arrived in the late afternoon and departed each

morning, cooking an evening and morning meal and being very game about it all, considering that she had only fallen in with our little group three weeks before. During this time, Dennis very slowly got better. His mind seemed to have been quite literally turned inside out. During certain times each day when he became more coherent he said that the experience had catapulted him to the edge of the Riemannian pseudosphere that is the universe, in which even parallel lines intersect. He claimed he had to come back into ordinary s.p.a.ce and was regressing inward through level after level after level. Very strange things went on during this period. He could hear my mind working. He was telepathic; of this I have no doubt. He could do perfect voice imitations of our mother and father. He became many people, imitating them perfectly. He saw me as a kind of shaman or messiah. He referred to me as "The Teach," not teacher or teaching but The Teach, a kind of personified alien amba.s.sador empowered to negotiate the entry of the human species into the councils of higher intelligence.

And there was much more; a vision of twentieth-century history, building the lens, and the end of time. He said that the discovery of a higher physical dimension was a few years ahead of us, but somehow linked up to Egypt, to Acacia tryptamine cults, to Tibet eight thousand years ago, to Bon-po shamanic magic and the / Ching. All these ideas were in constant circulation while he talked and performed incessantly.

No notes exist from this period. So filled was I with the a.s.sumption that we were abiding in eternity that I felt no need to write at all. As the world seemed to me to grow more perfect, I determined at some point that I would write a poem, but that moment never came. Nothing is coherent or remains connected from those five days. I remember it as the most intense time that I have ever gone through. There was not an emotional or intellectual chord in the human register that was not rung again and again in a thousand variations.

In the notes made weeks after those times I could only summarize those five days by labeling them, absurdly: fire, water, earth, man, peace. I sat and Dennis raved. Without his gla.s.ses, his eyes were wild, piercing, and unsettling to look into. Since the night of

his shamanic ramble, I had formed the intention not to sleep but to stand watch constantly with him day and night. For the next nine days I neither slept nor needed sleep. Though I know that such cases are on record, for years afterward I took my lack of a need for sleep for nine days as the most solid argument for the reality of the forces with which we experimented. Not only did I not need to sleep, but I was constantly thinking in a rich, calm, image-filled way that made my normal thought process seem a pale and jerkily animated shadow. This mental power continued throughout the sleepless period and long afterward.

The time that we were moving through seemed made of the reflections of what had preceded it and what was to follow. The first night of my decision not to sleep, March 6, was pa.s.sed in deep reverie and a growing amazement that I was actually functioning without any apparent need of sleep. In the last of the darkness before dawn, at a time I felt matched exactly the time when we performed the experiment two days before, I heard Dennis stir in his hammock inside the hut. Then I heard him make, low but strong and clear, the same undulating howl that had catapulted us into a new world forty-eight hours before. Three times it sounded, just as something in my mind a.s.sured me that it would.

The last howl was drawn out as before; it rose and fell for perhaps a minute. Then, as it faded away, I again heard the c.o.c.k's crow drifting across the whitening air from the mission. Why did things happen with such symmetry, as though a huge, ordered form was trying to surface in the very organization of the reality around us? Sunrise flamed across the sky and another of those t.i.tanic days began. The thing in my mind stirred to meet the challenges to reason that charged each new moment. All that remains of those times are images and incidents, only metaphors acting as sustained themes. All was myth-making and image-making, mercurial, meta-leveled, ever-flowing.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD.

In which Dennis and I explore the contents of our mutual illusions and illuminations.

The MORNING OF THE SEVENTH, Ev returned with Dave and Vanessa to the river, and for the first time in two days Dennis and I were alone. The atmosphere was one of calm. I busied myself sorting through and arranging the equipment. Our campsite was again spic and span. Dennis alternated between calmness and long harangues on a supra- cosmic scale as in The Starmaker of Olaf Stapleton. He imitated, personified, described, and otherwise invoked immense Gnostic and Manichaean ent.i.ties that were struggling on a cosmic scale. The ageless struggle between good and evil was being enacted as a fourth dimensional comic book in the labyrinth of his mind. But he was not without humor, occasionally moaning out that he felt "like an old Mandaean," then collapsing with laughter at this cleverness.

I sat in my hammock and verbally partic.i.p.ated as much as I could in all of this, though it was clear that Dennis had no difficulty in maintaining the conversation on his own. In fact, he seemed to have hit the main vein of the fountain of sprung verse.

I closed my eyes for a moment and there, fully formed beneath my eyelids, was the first of what I considered to be teachings or messages. It was a beautiful, recursive geometric form with four "petals." The voice in my mind informed me that this was "the valentine curve." Obviously the four petals of the curve looked somewhat like a valentine or a bleeding heart. I thought for an instant of the heart-shaped fruit I had fas.h.i.+oned into a water pipe. No obvious connection... the image slid. I got my notebook and drew the valentine curve, at first crudely, later much more smoothly. It made me think of Basil Valentine, a fifteenth-century alchemist and author of The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony. I had read the book, but could remember virtually nothing about it. I thought too of Valentinius, the Alexandrian Gnostic of the second century, and his doctrine that the material world was the condensed emotion of the errant Sophia, who had selfishly created a universe without undergoing any union except with herself. The concrescence of the anguish of the Sophia, the lowest of the Archons, into the physical world was an idea closely related to our own alchemical efforts. The condensation of emotion into matter; that theme was hair-raising. It was the theme that had brought us to the Amazon.

Alchemy was the gnosis of material transformation. Glues seemed everywhere; everything was webbed together in a magical fabric of meaning and affirmation and mystery.

During that day and the days that followed, thoughts and ideas of all sorts formed in my mind unbidden and would lead inevitably to some further expansion of the set of themes that we had organized our lives around. One of those themes that was seized upon and amplified, at first slowly and then more rapidly, radically and inclusively, was the set of ideas and relations.h.i.+ps contained in the / Ching, the Chinese oracle. These ancient and fragmentary commentaries on a still more ancient set of sixty-four oracular ideograms, called hexagrams, had long been of interest to me as part of my general interest in non- causal forms of logic. In fact, I had first learned of the / Ching from reading Jung, who suggested that the meaningful juxtaposition of a hexagram with a situation in the outer world, the juxtaposition that allows the / Ching to be used as a fortune-telling device, hinted at a noncausal connection between the inner

mental world and objective exterior reality. Jung named this phenomenon synchronicity.

For several years it had been my habit to throw the / Ching, which consists of manipulating forty-nine stalks of yarrow or in my case bamboo skewers whose configurations create the hexagrams, at each new and full moon and to record the throws on a slip of paper, which I kept inside the back cover of my copy of the book. The first day following the experiment the voice inside my head suggested that I get out my record of the hexagrams that I had thrown. I could hardly then imagine the insights and conclusions to which this simple suggestion would eventually lead. I went through this record of throws looking for an instance when I had thrown the first of the sixty-four hexagrams; upon finding that, I returned to the beginning of the list and looked for a record of the second hexagram being thrown, and so on. My list of throws covered three years and contained about eighty throws and their changes.

After a half-hour of the exercise I determined that, according to my record, I had thrown each of the sixty-four hexagrams at least once in the three years leading up to that moment. This mildly improbable fact seemed charged with significance to me. The likelihood of occurrence for each hexagram is not equal, and the odds of getting all the hexagrams in so few throws seemed unusual. It felt to me as if I had a kind of secret ident.i.ty that I was in the process of uncovering. It proved that I was somehow a reflection of the microcosm and had been chosen somehow to be in precisely the situation in which I found myself. Tears came easily at this personal verification of the ordered pattern of life whose designs I was discovering everywhere. I composed myself and then, at the strong prompting of the inner wave of understanding, I quietly burned the record of my / Ching throws. It was a very uncharacteristic thing for me to do.

Dennis watched all of this and then delivered himself of one of the many riddles that he was to propound over the next few days. "What can you do with a hole in a stick that you can't do with a stick in a hole?," he bellowed across the sandy expanse to where I stood by the fire. I a.s.sumed that this answer involved a dig at the cheerful and steamy a.s.sumptions of Tantra in favor of the idea that

a pipe was the superior vehicle of inter-dimensional travel and that was what you could do.

An hour or so later and after a long silence that was uncharacteristic of his new condition, Dennis looked up from his meditations and announced that he had just realized that he could cause any telephone to ring by simply concentrating on an image that he refused to divulge. He went further than that and claimed that he could make phones ring at anytime in the past during which telephones existed. To demonstrate this ability he dialed Mother sometime in the fall of 1953. He caught her in the act of listening to Dizzy Dean call a World Series game. And according to Dennis she refused to believe that he was on the phone, since she could see his three-year-old form asleep in front of her. He told her he would call back earlier and then spent the rest of the afternoon calling everyone he could think of at various times in the past, carrying on animated conversations and chortling to himself about the minds he was blowing and the wonders of what he called "Ma Bell."

And thus did the afternoon of March 6 pa.s.s.

A reasonable conclusion would have been to suppose that Dennis was toxically schizophrenic and that we should leave the Amazon. What muddied the water considerably was me. I was comparatively normal except for one thing: I insisted that everything was all right and that Dennis knew exactly what he was doing.

"It's okay," I attempted to a.s.sure the others. "He has done what he set out to do and now people should try to relax until this all plays out."

I felt this way although I knew nothing about how he had performed the experiment or discovered the theory. I knew only that from that dawn moment when we looked at the mushroom immediately after the experiment something very bizarre had happened to me.

I was in a very strange place. I felt as though I had become myself. My contact with the voice was like that of a student to a teacher. It let me know things. Beyond any possibility of argument I knew things that I couldn't ordinarily know. Ev had gone through the experiment, but nothing at all had happened to her. My other friends seemed very distant. They couldn't understand what was happening and preferred to reject us. Everyone thought that

everyone else was crazy. In fact, relative to their normal behavior everyone did behave very oddly.

The main thing the unseen teacher said was, "Do not worry. Do not worry, because there is something that you have to get straight about. Your brother will recover. Your companions will take care of him. Do not worry, but listen. You have to get this down."

Within hours after the experiment this started impinging on me- something that I must figure out.

This morning, the seventh, Dennis seemed to me to be more down to earth, but to such a slight degree that it was a matter of opinion whether he had made any improvement at all.

I noticed with interest that while he seemed disoriented and his ideation was structurally as wild and woolly as ever, in content there had been a definite sort of improvement. On the day before, he had seemed to be spread over so vast an amount of time and s.p.a.ce that there was little to be identified out of the cosmic churning that he was undergoing. On that day, to find even our own galaxy in his mind had been impossible. On the second day, he awoke within the galaxy and his visions and fantasies remained within it. Had that been the only instance of his telescoping back into himself, it would not have been worth noting, but the fact was that each step of his return to a normal state of mind was accomplished this way. The day after he reached the confines of the galaxy, he entered the solar system, condensing through its planets over several days until he identified only with Earth. Coalescing and condensing through the ecology of his home world, he came to think of himself as all humanity and was able to vividly relive all of its history. Later still, he became the embodiment of all the members of our vast and peculiar Irish family stretching back till before Judges had given us Numbers or Leviticus committed Deuteronomy, as James Joyce put it. They were of all kinds and he played them all: hard- rock miners, a seventeenth-century cleric sweating beneath a burden of l.u.s.t, bombastic patriarchs and thin-faced women one generation, and women with shoulders like field hands and tongues like hedgeclippers the next. After a good bit of lolling around in those environs he was finally resolved down into our immediate family and progressed from there to confront and resolve the question of whether he was Dennis or Terence. Finally and thankfully, he came to rest with the realization

that he was Dennis, returned from the edge of the universe of mind, restored and reborn, a shaman in the fullest sense of the word.

But that reintegration and recovery was still twenty days in the future as we walked to the pasture the morning of March 7, just as we had on the morning after the experiment. We walked to the top of a small rise on which grew a young tree. Ama, the Witoto word for "brother," had become one of the many new forms of address that Dennis had created for me. Now as we walked along, we kept our eyes open for mushrooms, as had become our habit even though all thought of eating mushrooms was behind us now.

Dennis strode ahead of me and made his way to the tree. Bending down and parting the gra.s.ses at the base of the tree, he pointed to the letters AMA carved in the bark. It was a carving at least several years old. The incident was confusing. How had Dennis known the carving was there and what did it mean anyhow? He answered my questions by sweeping his hand toward the dawn horizon and announcing that this was the planet Venus, or the archetypal world of Venus, I have no idea which. These a.s.sertions that flew completely in the face of reason were very hard to take and enkindled in me brief stabs of despair for his state of mind, though most of the time I was able to convince myself that he was improving and returning from the unseen worlds that were so vivid to him that he could see nothing else.

I tried directing the developing fantasy of my brother-I used the idea that the re-creation of the scattered self was as an alchemical act with immense personal and historical significance. Each morning for several days after the fifth of March we would walk to the pasture and I would demand of him "the stone." Neither of us perceived these goings on through anything like the light of normal consciousness. The world seemed filled with a near-bending wonder and power that a.s.sured me that all things were possible and that the course of things in the light of this was moving in the right direction.