Chapter 6 Kathmandu Interlude
 Two years before, during the spring and summer of '69, I lived in Nepal and studied the
 Tibetan language. The wave of interest in Buddhist studies was just beginning, so that
 those of us in Nepal with Tibetan interests were a tightly knit group. My purpose in studying
 Tibetan was different from that of most Westerners involved with the language in Nepal. They
 were nearly all interested in some aspect of Mahayana Buddhist thought, while I was
 interested in the religious tradition that antedated the introduction of Buddhism into
 Tibet in the 7th century. The indigenous pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet was a kind of shamanism
 closely related to the classical shamanism of Siberia. Tibetan folk shamanism is called
 "Pön" and it continues to be practiced today in the mountainous area of Nepal that borders
 Tibet. Practitioners of Pön are usually despised by the Buddhist community, being thought of
 as heretics and generally low types. My interest in Pön and its practitioners, the Pönpo,
 arose out of an interest in Tibetan painting. It is a commonplace of such painting that
 the most fantastic, extravagant, and ferocious images are drawn from the pre-Buddhist substratum
 of folk imagery. The terrifying, multi-armed, and multi-headed guardians of the Buddhist
 teaching, called Dharmapalas, with their aureoles of flame and light, are autothonous Pön deities
 whose allegiance to the late-arriving Buddhist religion is maintained only by powerful spells
 and rituals which bind and secure these forceful demons.
 It seemed to me that the shamanic tradition that spawned such outlandish and fantastic
 images must have at some time had the knowledge of a hallucinogenic plant. Shamanic ecstasy
 in Siberia was attained through the use of Amanita muscaria, and R. G. Wasson has made
 a good case for the use of the same mushroom in Vedic India, since Tibet is situated roughly
 between these two areas. It did not seem impossible that before the coming of Buddhism hallucinogens
 were part of the indigenous shamanic tradition. Amanita muscaria was only one of several plants
 that might have served as a hallucinogen in ancient Tibet. Pagaman Harmala of the Zygophilaceae
 is another hallucinogen. It, like Banisteriops's copy, contains the hallucinogenic alkaloid
 harmine in considerable quantities, and is probably a hallucinogen by itself. Certainly
 in combination with a DMT-containing plant, of which the flora of India boasts several
 (Arundhodonax, for example), it should yield a strong hallucinogen whose composition would
 not differ chemically from the ayahuasca and yahé brews of Amazonas.
 My interest in Tibetan painting and hallucinogenic shamanism led me to Nepal. I had learned that
 there were refugee camps in Nepal and near Simla in India, whose populations were nearly
 entirely outclassed Punpo, unwelcome in the camps where Buddhist refugees were housed.
 I wanted to learn from the Punpo whatever they still retained of any knowledge of hallucinogens
 that they might once have had. I was convinced that the original source of the fantastic
 images in Tibetan painting must be a shamanic use of plant hallucinogens. I wished, in my
 naivete, to prove this idea, and to write a monograph about it.
 As soon as I arrived in Asia, the enormity of the task and effort that it would require
 were seen more nearly in their correct proportions. My proposed project was actually an outline
 for a life of scholarly research. Naturally, I found that nothing could be done at all
 until I was familiar with the Tibetan language. I put aside all the ideas I had hoped eventually
 to research, and instead resolved simply to dedicate myself to learning as much Tibetan
 as I could in the few months that circumstances gave me in Nepal.
 I moved out of Kathmandu, away from the pleasures of the hashish dens and the social swirl of
 the international community of travelers, smugglers, and adventurers that had made Kathmandu
 its own. I moved to Bodhnath, a small village of great antiquity a few miles east of Kathmandu,
 and recently flooded with Tibetans from Hlasa, people who spoke the Hlasa dialect that is
 understood throughout the Himalayas. The people of the village were Buddhist, and I made my
 arrangements to study with the monks there, without mentioning my interest in the Punpo,
 a tradition considered by them debased and pagan. I sought lodging and came to terms
 with Denbadu, the local miller and a Niwari. He agreed to rent a room on the third floor
 of his prosperous adobe house which fronted the muddy main street of Bodhnath. I struck
 a bargain with a local girl who agreed to bring me fresh water each day, and I settled
 comfortably in. I whitewashed the adobe walls of my room, commissioned a huge mosquito net
 in the market in Kathmandu, and arranged my books and small Tibetan bench inside. I was
 very comfortable and treasured my existence as a traveler and scholar.
 Tashi Yaltsin Lama was my teacher. He was a very kind and understanding galukpa. In
 spite of his age, he would arrive every morning promptly at seven for our two-hour lesson.
 I was like a child. We began with penmanship and the alphabet. Each morning after the lama
 departed I would study for several more hours, and then the rest of the day was my own. I
 explored the King's Game Sanctuary further east of Bodhnath and the Hindu Ghats at nearby
 Pashupatinath. I also made the acquaintance of the few Westerners that were living in
 the vicinity. Among those whom I met there were an English
 couple of my own age. They were self-consciously fascinating. He was thin and blonde, with
 an aquiline nose and an arched manner. He was the model product of the British public
 school system, haughty and urbane, but eccentric and often hilarious. She was small and unhealthily
 thin. Scrawny is the word I used to describe her to myself. She was from Somerset, red-haired
 and wild-tempered, cynical, and like her companion with a razor wit. They had both been disowned
 by their families, were traveling hippies as we all were then. Their relationship was
 bizarre. They had stuck together from England, but the relaxing of tension which a rival
 in bucolic Nepal had brought had been too much for their fragile liaison. Now they lived
 apart, he at one end of Bodhnath and she alone at the other, and they met only for the combined
 purpose of visiting someone or of abrading each other's nerves.
 In that exotic setting they managed to charm me completely. Whether alone or together,
 I was always interested to pause from my studies and to pass some time with them. Naturally,
 we discussed my work at times, and since it involved hallucinogens, they were very interested
 being familiar with LSD from their days in the London scene. We discovered that we had
 mutual friends in India, that we all loved the novels of Thomas Hardy. We became fast
 friends. It was a pleasant time.
 During this time, my personally evolved method for probing the shamanic dimension was to
 smoke DMT at the peak point of an LSD experience. I would do this whenever I took LSD, which
 was quite occasionally, and it would allow me to enter the tryptamine dimension for a
 slightly extended period of time. As the summer solstice of '69 approached, I laid plans for
 such an experiment. I would take LSD the night of the solstice and sit up all night on my
 roof smoking hashish and stargazing. I mentioned my plan to my two English friends, and they
 expressed a desire to join me. This was fine with me, but the problem was that there was
 not enough reliable LSD for them to take any. My own tiny supply had arrived in Kathmandu
 prophetically hidden inside a small ceramic mushroom mailed from Aspen. Almost as a joke,
 I suggested that they substitute the seeds of the Himalayan detura, detura metal, for
 the LSD. Deturas are the source of a number of tropane alkaloids, scopolamine, hyalcyamine,
 etc., compounds which produce a pseudo-hallucinogenic effect. They give an impression of flying or
 of confronting visions, but all in a very hard-to-keep-control-of-and-difficult-to-recollect-later dimension.
 The seeds of detura metal are used in Nepal by sadhus, or wandering hermits and holy men,
 so their use was not unknown in the area. Nevertheless, my suggestion was made facetiously,
 since the difficulty of controlling detura is legendary. To my surprise, my friends agreed
 that this was something they wanted to do. We arranged that they would arrive at my home
 at six on the appointed day. When the evening finally came, I moved my blankets and pipes
 up to the roof of the building. From there I could command a fine view of the surrounding
 village with its enormous stupa with staring eyes. The upper golden levels of the stupa
 were at that time encased in scaffolding where repairs necessitated by a lightning strike
 suffered some months previously were going on. The white-domed bulk of the stupa gave
 the adobe-mud village of Bodnath a Saucerian and unearthly quality. Further away, rising
 up many thousands of feet, I could see the great Annapurna Range. In the middle distance
 the land was a patchwork of emerald paddy. Six o'clock came and went and my friends had
 not arrived. At seven they had still not been seen, and so I took my treasured tab of orange
 sunshine and settled down to wait. Ten minutes later they arrived. I could already feel myself
 going and so gestured to the two piles of detura seeds that I had prepared. They took
 them downstairs to my room and ground them in a mortar and pestle before washing them
 down with some tea. By the time they had returned to the roof and gotten comfortably settled,
 I was surging through mental space.
 [Music]
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 We sat and hours seemed to pass. When they seated themselves I had been too distant to
 be aware of what was going on. She was seated directly across from me and he further back
 to one side and in the shadow. He played his flute. I passed the pipe and the hours passed.
 The moon rose high in the sky and full. I fell into long hallucinatory reveries that
 each lasted many minutes.
 [Music]
 When I emerged from a particularly long spell of visions, I found that my friend had stopped
 playing and gone away, leaving me with his lady. I had promised them both that I would
 let them try some DMT during the evening. My glass pipe and tiny stash of waxy orange
 DMT were right before me. Slowly and with the fluid movements of a dream, I filled the
 pipe and offered it to her. The stars, hard and unglittering, stared down from a mighty
 distance on all of this. She took the pipe and took two deep inhalations, sufficient
 for a person so frail. Then the pipe was returned to me and I followed her into it with four
 huge inhalations, the fourth of which I held onto until I had broken through. For me it
 was an enormous amount of DMT and I immediately felt the sense of entering a high vacuum.
 There was a high-pitched whine and the sound of cellophane ripping as I was transformed
 into the radio intellect that is a human being in DMT ecstasy.
 I was surrounded by the chattering elf machines and the more-than-Arabian halted spaces that
 would shame a Bibiana, manifestations of a power both alien and bizarrely beautiful raging
 around me. At the point where I would normally have expected the visions to fade, the pretreatment
 with LSD synergized the situation to a higher level. With the translinguistic glossolalia
 of the DMT elf machines howling in my ears, I suddenly found myself flying hundreds of
 miles above the earth and in the company of silvery disks, several I could not tell how
 many, I looked down and realized that I was moving south, apparently in earth orbit, over
 Soviet Siberia. Ahead of me I could see the great plain of Shan and the mass of the Himalayas
 rising up in front of the red-yellow waste of India. The sun would rise in about two
 hours. In a series of telescoping leaps I went from orbit to a point where I could specifically
 pick out the round valley that is the Kathmandu Valley. Then, in the next leap, the valley
 filled my field of vision. I seemed to be approaching it in ground level at great speed.
 I could see the Hindu temple and the houses of Kathmandu, the temple of Svayambhunath
 to the west of the city, and the stupa of Bodhnath gleaming white a few miles to the
 east. Then Bodhnath was a mandala of houses and circular streets filling my vision, and
 among the several hundred rooftops I found my own. The next moment I slammed into my
 body and was refocused on the rooftop and the woman in front of me.
 Incongruously she had come to the event wearing a silver satin full-length evening dress,
 an heirloom, the sort of thing one would have found in an antique clothing store in Notting
 Hill Gate. I fell forward and thought that my hand was covered with some cool white liquid.
 It was the fabric of the dress. To that moment neither of us had thought of the other as
 a lover. Our relationship had functioned on a quite different level. Suddenly all the
 normal sets of relations were obviated. We both reached out toward the other, and the
 impression I had was distinctly that of passing through her, of physically reaching beyond
 her. She pulled her dress overhead in a single gesture. I did the same with my shirt which
 ripped to pieces in my hands as I took it off over my head. I heard buttons fly, and
 I heard my glasses land somewhere and shatter. Then we made love, or rather we had an experience
 that vaguely related to making love, but was a thing unto itself. We were both howling
 and singing the glossolalia of D&T, rolling over the ground with everything awash and
 calling geometric hallucinations. She was transformed. Words exist to describe what
 she became, pure anima, kawu, utopia, something erotic but not human, something addressed
 to the species and not to the individual, glittering with the possibility of cannibalism,
 madness, space, and extinction. She seemed on the edge of devouring me. Reality was shattered.
 This kind of fucking must go on at the very limit of what is possible. Everything had
 been transformed into orgasm and visible, chattering oceans of elf language. Then I
 saw that where our bodies were glued together was flowing out of her cunt over me, over
 the floor of the roof, flowing everywhere with some sort of obsidian liquid, something
 dark and glittering with color and lights within it. After the DMT flash, after the
 many orgasms with the transformed woman become myth and archetype, after all of this, this
 new thing shocked me to the core. What was it and what was going on? I looked at it.
 I looked right into it, and it was the surface of my own mind reflected in front of me, translinguistic
 matter, the living, opalescent excrescences of the abyss of hyperspace. Something generated
 by the sex act performed under such crazy conditions. I looked into it again and saw
 now a scene, the llama who taught me Tibetan, who should be 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, looked away from my companion, whom I could not look at. Her aura of strangeness
 was so intense. Then I realized that we had been singing and yodeling and uttering wild
 orgasmic howls for what must have been several minutes. It meant everyone in Bodenoth must
 be awake and about to open their doors and windows and demand to know what was going
 on and what was going on. Good God!
 The thought of discovery sobered me enough to begin to realize that I had been living
 in a dream. It was a dream that had never occurred to me before. It had never occurred
 to me enough to realize that we must get away from this exposed situation, both of us completely
 naked and the scene around us one of total unexplainable chaos. She was lying down, unable
 to get up, and so I picked her up and made my way down the narrow staircase, past the
 grain storage bins and into my room. All the time I remember saying over and over to her
 and to myself, "I am a human being! I am a human being!" I was no longer sure. We
 waited in my room many minutes. Slowly it dawned that by some miracle no less strange
 than everything else that had gone on, no one was awake demanding to know what was occurring.
 No one seemed even to have heard. To calm us I made tea, and as I did this I had a chance
 to assess my companion's state of mind. She seemed quite delirious, quite unable to
 discuss with me what had gone on only a few moments before on the roof. It is an effect
 typical of detoura that whatever experiences one has they are very difficult, usually impossible
 to recollect later. It seemed that though what had gone on had involved the most intimate
 of acts between two people, nevertheless I had been 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 glasses. Incredibly they were unbroken, although I had distinctly heard them break.
 With my glasses and our clothes I returned to my room where my companion was sleeping.
 I smoked a little hashish 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 went immediately
 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 was very bad for her to be wandering alone around the
 village at night. I jumped up and threw on my jalaba and began to search, not on the
 roof, not near the grain storage. I found her on the ground level of the building. She
 was sitting on the earth floor staring at her reflection in the gas tank of a motorcycle
 that belonged to the Miller's son-in-law. She was still disoriented in the way that
 is typical, hallucinating persons present, mistaking one person for another. "Are you
 my tailor?" she asked me several times as I led her back to my room. When we were both
 once again upstairs in my quarters I took off my jalaba and we both discovered that
 I was wearing what she delicately described as "my knickers." They were quite too
 small on me and neither of us knew that they had come to be on me. It was the capstone
 of an amazing evening and I roared with laughter. I returned her knickers to her and we went
 to bed, puzzled, reassured, exhausted, and amused. As this experience passed behind us
 the girl and I became even closer friends. We never made love again. It was not really
 the relationship that suited us. She remembered nothing of the events on the roof. About a
 week after all this was history 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 "love" L-U-V. 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. It was this incident which rekindled my interest in the violet fluids which ayahuasca
 shamans are said to generate on the surface of their skins and used 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 assure Dennis that night at La Charrera. I did not tell the absurd
 part about waking up wearing someone else's underwear. It was damn embarrassing and absurd
 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 be the focus of an instance of telepathy that was the most convincing
 that I have ever witnessed.
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