[Thunder] True Hallucinations by Terrence McKenna [Music] I am Terrence McKenna and this is True Hallucinations a talking book produced by Sound Photosynthesis copyright 1984 [Music] and introducing Nomad Band [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Chapter 1 The Call of the Secret At the present moment the UFO is a true mystery it is easier to say what it is not much of my thought of the dozen years past has been name-making and contemplation closely guarded by the chaotically jeweled angels "Every angel is terrible" wrote Rilke and at once sacred and profane the UFO rises in my life as it may at some future point in human history I have chosen a literary approach the UFO is master of place and space, time and spirit yet search for a simple form to convey this brought me to follow tradition to write a chronological narrative in early February of 1971 I was passing through southern Colombia on my way with my brother and friends to an expedition into Colombian Amazonas our route led us through Florencia the provincial capital of the departamento of Caquetá there we paused a few days awaiting an airplane to carry us to our embarkation point on the Rio Putumayo a river whose vast expanse is the border between Colombia and her two southern neighbors, Ecuador and Peru the day was especially hot and we had left the oppressive confines of our hotel near the noisy central market and bus station we walked southwest, out of town, perhaps a mile here were the warm waters of the Rio Acha across rolling pastures of tall grass after swimming in the river, playing in deep pools the warm torrent had carved in the black basaltic stream bed we returned through the same meadows one more familiar than I with the appearance of Streferia cubensis pointed out a single large specimen standing tall and alone in an old bit of cow manure impulsively and at my companion's suggestion I ate the whole mushroom it all occupied but a moment and then on we trudged tired from our swim a tropical thunderstorm moving toward us along the eastern edge of the Andean Cordillera where Florencia is located for perhaps a quarter hour we walked on, mostly in silence wearily I hung my head, almost hypnotized by the sight of the regular motion of my boots cutting through the grass to align my back to throw off my lethargy I paused and stretched, scanning the horizon the feeling of the bigness of the sky that I have come to associate with psilocybin rushed down on me there for the first time I asked my friends to pause and sat down heavily on the ground a silent thunder seemed to shake the air before me things stood out with a new presence and significance it came like a wave and passed like a wave as the first fury of the tropical storm burst over us leaving us soaked in the sudden retreat the brief moment preceding our frantic withdrawal went unmentioned by me I recognized my experience as being induced by the mushroom but I was involved, I thought in a deep jungle search for hallucinogens of a different sort orally active DMT-containing drugs and Yahé and its admixture plants I filed the mushroom experience as something to look into another time long-time residents of Colombia assured me that the mushroom occurred exclusively on the dung of Cebu cattle and I assumed that in the jungle of the interior where I was shortly to be I could expect no cattle or pasture I put the thought of mushrooms from my mind as I anticipated the rigors of the Rio Putumayo descent toward our target destination a remote mission called La Chorera why had people like ourselves come to the steaming jungles of Amazonian Colombia? we were a party of five bound by friendship, extravagant imagination, naivete and a dedication to travel and exotic experience Ev, our translator, was the only member of the group not long an acquaintance of us all she was an American like ourselves who had lived several years in South America and had traveled in the East where I had passed her once in the Kathmandu airport another story in Colombia she was recently free of a long relationship and fell in with our group having nothing better to do she and I were lovers of some two weeks when we arrived at La Chorera the other three members of our party beside myself were my brother, the youngest and least traveled of us a student of botany and a colleague of long standing Vanessa, an old school friend of mine from the experimental college in Berkeley trained in anthropology and photography and traveling on her own and Dave, another old friend of mine a gay meditator, a maker of pottery an embroiderer of blue jeans and like Vanessa, a New Yorker as for myself just four months before this trip my brother and I had endured the grief of the death of our mother previous to that I had been traveling three years in India and Indonesia had worked in Japan and then in Canada where we had all held a reunion and planned this Amazon expedition to investigate the depths of the psychedelic experience I deliberately do not wish to say much about any of us let me say though that we were miseducated perhaps but well educated certainly our differences arose out of the faith that each had in his own ability to understand the situation correctly often these descriptions did not agree as is a common enough situation among strong personalities or witnesses to an unusual event we were complex people or we would not have been doing what we were doing none of us were yet 24 years old we had been drawn together through the political turmoil that had characterized years shared in Berkeley we had sorted the ideological options and had decided to put all of our chips on the exploration of the potential of the psychedelic experience as the shortest path to the sort of millennium that our radical politics had taught us to hope for we had no very good idea at all about what to expect from the Amazon we had collected as much ethnobotanical information as was available this data told us where the various hallucinogens were to be sought but not what to expect when we found them I have given some thought to trying to reconstruct how predisposed we might have been to our eventual experiences I find in a letter written 11 months before our expedition that Dennis was even then the person with the clearest conception he wrote to me in China in May of 1970 to say "As to the central shamanic quest and the idea that its resolution may entail physical death indeed a sobering thought I would be interested in hearing just how likely you consider this possibility and why I have not thought of it in terms of death though I have considered that it may well give us as living men willful access to the doorway the dead pass daily this I consider to be a kind of hyperspatial astral projection that allows the hyperorgan consciousness to instantly manifest itself at any point in the space-time matrix or at all points simultaneously A UFO is essentially this hyperspatially mobile psychic vortex and the trip may well involve contact with some race of hyperspatial dwellers probably it will be an encounter similar to a flying lesson instruction in the use of the trans-dimensional stone how to navigate in hyperspace and perhaps an introductory course in cosmic ecology tending retention of the physical form under such circumstances would be it seems a matter of choice rather than a necessity though it could be a matter of indifference since in the hyperspatial web all existing physical manifestations would be open I would say that time is not of the essence for the venture except in so far as the culture deaths of the tribes we are seeking are proceeding at an appalling rate [birds chirping] [birds chirping] [birds chirping] however colorful our fantasies our operational interests specifically centered on DMT dimethyltryptamine type drugs quite simply because their action though very brief seemed to us the most intense of the hallucinogens we knew DMT is not an object of common experience even among drug enthusiasts and so a word must be said about it it is a crystalline paste or powder in its pure synthetic form and as such it is smoked in a glass pipe with no admixture after a few lungfuls the onset of the experience is rapid 15 seconds to a minute the hallucinogenic experience which it triggers lasts 3 to 7 minutes and is unambiguously intense it is so bizarre and intense that even the most devoted aficionados of hallucinogens will usually pass it by yet it is the commonest and the most widely distributed of the naturally occurring hallucinogens and is the basis when not the entire component of most aboriginally used hallucinogens in tropical South America naturally as a product of plant metabolism it never occurs in anything like the concentrations at which it comes from the laboratory yet South American shamans by predisposing themselves to its effects in various ways do seek the same levels of reality obliterating intensity achievable with pure DMT its strangeness and power so exceeds that of other hallucinogens that DMT seemed finally to define for myself and my friends at any rate the maximum exfoliation of the hallucinogenic dimension that can occur without serious risk to the organism we thought therefore that our phenomenological description of the hallucinogenic dimension should begin by locating a strong DMT containing aboriginal hallucinogen and then exploring with an open mind the shamanic states that it made accessible to this end we had sifted the literature on tryptamine drugs in the upper Amazon basin and learned that while Yahé or Ayahuasca the brew of Banisteriopsis capi with the DMT admixture is known over a wide area just as are several kinds of DMT containing snuffs there was one DMT containing hallucinogen that was severely restricted in its usage Ukuhé is made from the resin of certain trees of the Myristicaceous genus of Arola mixed with the ashes of other plants and rolled into pellets what caught our eye about the description of this drug was that the Witoto tribe who alone knew the secret of making it used it to talk to little men and to gain knowledge from them these little people are one bridge between the motifs of UFO contact and more traditional strange doings in the woods involving elves and fairies the worldwide tradition of little people is well studied in the fairy faith in Celtic countries by W.E. Evans-Vance a book which was influential on Jacques Vallée's UFO quest as well as our own the mention of little men rang a bell since in Berkeley in my own experience smoking synthesized DMT there had been the impression of bursting into a space inhabited by merry elf-like self-transforming machine creatures the sense of being literally in some other dimension which this experience provoked had been the focus of our decision to concentrate on tryptamine drugs after sifting the literature of the tryptamine hallucinogens we came eventually to Richard Schultes' paper "Virola as an Orally Administered Hallucinogen" his description of the use of the resin of Virola Theodora as an orally active DMT drug was fascinating so too was the fact that the hallucinogen seemed to be limited in its use to a very small area Schultes was an inspiring voice when he wrote of Ukuhei "Further fieldwork in the original home region of these Indians will be necessary for a full understanding of this interesting hallucinogen interest in this newly discovered hallucinogen does not lie wholly within the bounds of anthropology or ethnobotany it bears very directly on certain pharmacological matters and when considered with the other plants with psychotinomimetic properties due to tryptamines this new oral drug poses problems which must now be faced and if possible toxicologically explained" Based on Schultes' report we determined to go ourselves to the vicinity of La Charrera to seek Ukuhei to abandon our studies whatever careers might be ahead of such opinionated psychoactivists to pay our own way to the Amazon to see if the titanically strange dimensions that we had encountered in DMT trance were even more accessible via the DMT drugs which the shamans of the Amazon had developed it was of these drugs that I had been thinking when I had no time for the stropharia mushroom encountered in the pasture near Florencia I was eager to press on with the quest for the exotic, barely reported, Huitoto Ukuhei little did I imagine that the search for Ukuhei would soon after arrival at La Charrera be all but forgotten in the discovery of the mushroom so abundant there and the strange power that seemed to swirl around those foggy, emerald pastures [music] my first intimation of La Charrera as a place different from other places came when we arrived at Puerto Leguizamo our proposed point of embarkation down the Rio Putumayo it is a place to be reached from Florencia and the rest of Colombia by airplane as no roads make their way through the jungle to it it is as tired and oppressive of a North American river town as one could ever hope to see William Burroughs passed this way in his search for Yahe in the 50s he described it then as "looking like some place after a flood" it has changed little we were barely installed in our hotel and returned from the ritual registration that goes on in the frontier areas of Colombia when the matron of the hotel informed us that a countryman of ours was living nearby it seemed incredible that an American could be living in such an out-of-the-way and thoroughly rural river town in Colombia when La Señora remarked that this man, El Señor Brown was very old and also a black man it all became even more puzzling my curiosity aroused I left immediately in the company of one of the laotish sons of the hotel woman new dimensions were added as we walked along my guide could hardly wait for us to get out of the door of the hotel before informing me that the man we were to see was mal y bizarro El Señor Brown es un sanguinero un sanguinero dice I could not believe it for a moment the horror that the rubber boom brought to the Amazon Indians in the early years of this century has lived on a memory for the oldest people and a terrifying legend for the younger Indians in the area surrounding La Charrera the Huitoto population had been systematically reduced from 40,000 in 1905 to about 5,000 today I could not imagine that the man I was to meet had any real connection with those distant events I suppose that this story I was hearing meant that I was to meet a local boogeyman around whom extravagant stories had grown up we shortly reached a ramshackle and indistinguished house a small yard hidden behind a tall board fence my companion knocked and yelled and soon a young man similar to my guide came and opened the gate my escort melted away and the gate closed behind me a large pig lay in the lowest, wettest part of the yard three steps up was a veranda upon the veranda, smiling and motioning forward sat a very thin, very old, much wrinkled black man John Brown it is not often that one meets a living legend and had I known more about the person I confronted I would have been even more amazed than I was "Yes," he said, "I am an American" "Yes, hell yes, I'm old, 93 years old" "Me history, baby, is so long" he laughed dryly, like the rustle of roof thatch when tarantulas stir the son of a slave, John Brown had left America in 1885, never to return he had gone to Barbados and then to France he had been a merchant seaman and had seen Aden and Bombay around 1910 he had come to Peru, to Iquitos there he had been made a work crew foreman in the notorious House of Arana which was the main force behind the ruthless exploitation of the Indians of Amazonas during the rubber boom I spent several hours with El Senor Brown he was an extraordinary person at once near and yet ghostly and far away a living bit of history he had been the personal servant of Colonel Whiffen who explored the La Charrera area around 1912 John Brown is described in Whiffen's now rare book Explorations of the Upper Amazon John Brown was the last person to see the French explorer Jean Robuchon who disappeared on the Rio Caquetá in 1913 "Yes, he had a big black dog that never left him," mused Brown John Brown spoke Witoto had lived with a Witoto woman for many years at one point he knew the area into which we were going intimately he had never heard of Ucuje but in 1915 he had taken Yahé for the first time and at La Charrera his descriptions of his experience was an added inspiration to continue toward our chosen goal it was only after I returned from the Amazon that I learned that it had been this same John Brown who had exposed the atrocities of the rubber barons in the Putumayo when Roger Casement then the British Consul in Rio de Janeiro came to Peru to investigate the atrocity stories it was John Brown who returned to London with Casement to give evidence to the Royal High Commission investigation José Estacion Rivera a Colombian historian has told the story differently and implicates Brown in the murders thus providing the basis for the Sanguinaros story I was impressed by Brown's sincerity by the depth of his understanding of me by the way that Roger Casement in a world nearly history a world known to me only from its brief mention in the pages of Joyce's Ulysses lived and moved before me in those long rambling conversations on his veranda he spoke long and eloquently of La Charrera he had not been there since 1935 but I was to find it much as he described it the fever haunted old town on the lowland across the lake no longer stands but the dungeons for the Indian slaves can still be seen crumbling iron rings sit deep in sweating basaltic stone the house of Arana is no more and Peru long ago abandoned her rights to the area of Colombia but the old town of La Charrera is ghostly indeed and so is the broad trail or trocha that we would shortly use to walk the 110 kilometers that separate La Charrera from the Rio Putumayo up to 20,000 Indians gave their lives to push that trail through the jungle Indians who refused to work had the bottoms of their feet and their buttocks removed by machete walking those gloomy empty trails one seems often to hear the grumble of voices or the rustle of chained feet John Brown's rambling monologue prepared me for the strangeness and on the morning that our boat was leaving to carry us downriver we stopped at his house on our way to the landing his eyes and skin shone he was the gatekeeper of the platonic world downriver from Puerto Leguizamo and he knew it I felt like a child before him and he knew that too bye bye babies, bye bye was his dry farewell [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] (electronic music) [BLANK_AUDIO] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.65 sec Decoding : 2.27 sec Transcribe: 1779.88 sec Total Time: 1782.81 sec