Once upon a line I met a lowly girl to whom I don't go fancy. Thank you for the present tense, she said, I do believe I share your sympathies. Oh, the ocean blows so lovely, oh, the wind blows so free. Birds are on the water, fish are in the air, they fly for me. Once upon a time I met a pretty girl to whom I took a fantasy. Once upon a climb I met a clumsy girl to whom I took a fancy. Thank you for the present, but she said, I do believe it's you who fell on me. Oh, the sunlight glows so softly, oh, the moon will burn the seas. Clouds are in the harbor, boats are sailing backwards on the breeze. Once upon a time I met a pretty girl to whom I took a fantasy. Chapter 7 A Violet Psycho-Fluid At the close of my story we all went to sleep for a few fitful hours. In the dim light of dawn, Ev and I made our way to a cluster of huts about three quarters of a mile away on the shore of the Agaraparana above the Choro. We knew that Weetoto, coming down the river to the mission to deliver their children to school, would stay in those normally empty houses. Our hope was to buy some eggs, papayas, or squash to supplement our diet of brown rice, yucca, and plantainose. Instead, we found only a small group of people, and the only item for sale was a grapefruit-sized, green, heart-shaped fruit filled with slimy, vaguely sweet seeds awash in a light purple syrup. I do not know even today what that fruit was. I have described it to botanist acquaintances and have never heard a satisfactory identification. And I have yet to encounter these fruits again. They were 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 ocean 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 chore. 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 left our own hut and went in search of food, Dennis had been deeply asleep, but now he was up and had apparently gone immediately to awaken Vanessa and describe to her his experiences of a few hours previous, experiences whose recollection was being excitedly told as we arrived at the house and set down the load. Throughout the making of breakfast, the events of the last evening were re-discussed and dissected. Vanessa and Dave were unmoved by Dennis's excited assertion 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 idea and made his way back up the hill to the Knoll house to be alone, and there he wrote. 28 February 1971. I approached these pages with a peculiar sense of urgency, as a man like who had confronted an inexplicable 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. 24 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. This may be the last characters of 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 groups but finds no words, I must be careful to avoid not distinguishing between mere language, symbol, metaphor, and the reality I am attempting to apply it to. 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 audio phenomena. The state becomes possible when highly biodynamic 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 the 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 ingesting the mushrooms, we lay waiting in our hammocks. The heavy, poisoned feeling that commonly passes briefly over the limbs at the beginning of the Stropharia visions had by this time passed 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. Not such a strange wrap 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 audio 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, crackling electrical sound. I tried to imitate these noises with my vocal cords, just experimenting with a kind of humming, buzzing vocal sound made deep in the throat. Suddenly it was as if the sound of my voice locked into 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 shining surface of the gently drifting Igaraparana, 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 washing out my tennis shoes on a large, flat rock that the shifting height of the river had conveniently exposed just a foot or two above the waterline. Doubtless, whenever it was so exposed, it served as the favorite local laundry spot. Magic spot. It's magic at that moment, still fourteen days into the future. But there we sat and talked. It had been about sixteen hours since the episode with the strange sound during the trip of the evening before. 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 is 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?" "Ideas about how we can use this effect or this stuff or whatever it is. My intuition is that it is related to the psycho-fluids that Harner reported and to what happened to you in Bodna. 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. Matter that is hyperdimensional and therefore translinguistic. Is that what you mean?" "Whatever that means. But something like that, I guess." "Gad! Why not? I mean, it's pretty nuts, but no more nuts than the shamanic magic that we came here looking into." "No, I suppose not. But here's 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're 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. So here we are, very much on the brink of deep water. We are having something like beginner's luck, you know, finding the others so accessible. The mushroom is doing this, or the mushroom and the Yahé smoking. It is so hard to be sure. So many variables. There's a lot of synchronistic activity, too." "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, 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." We talked at length there by the river's edge, ranging over the options and the possibilities. He was insistent in linking my experiences in Nepal with a very strange phenomenon occurring in Hevaro shamanism. The people take Yahé, and they and other people who have taken Yahé, but no one else, can see a violet fluid. It is described as violet or deep blue, and it bubbles and is like a liquid. One vomits it. When one vomits from taking Yahé, this purple goo comes out of one's body. It cannot only be vomited or regurgitated, but it forms on the surface of the skin like sweat. The Hevaro do much of their magic with this peculiar stuff. They say that they spread it out on the ground in front of them, and that one can look at this material and see other times and other places. By their reports, it is made out of something completely trans-normal. It is made out of space-time, or it is made out of mind, or it is pure hallucination objectively expressed, but always keeping itself within the confines of a liquid. There is an instance in the teaching of Don Juan where the entity, Mescalito, holds up his hand, and Castaneda sees his whole past, a past incident in his life, in this hand. Supposedly, if this phenomenon has an empirical validity, what is happening is a very thin film of this projective trans-dimensional goo is there, 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 lies in the realm of speculation, of course. Does this stuff exist, or is it just a hallucination? Who can believe in a thing like that? Dennis felt strongly that it was connected with sounds. One could either stabilize the stuff or cause it to appear by doing something with one's voice. It was a strange idea, because one could extrapolate it infinitely. What this stuff could be, that if one made it in three dimensions, then it would be anything. It was ectoplasmic, bubbling mind goo in the fourth dimension. It seemed possible to suppose that one might pierce the other dimension and have this stuff come boiling out. He talked a lot about it. We cut down the mushroom intake, except that I kept nibbling 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. What could we do with it? [music] Recalling it now, some eight years later, it is hard to be sure, having learned so much since. Just what we did believe. Just what level of sophistication we did have. Our mood was one of delight and light. The several mushroom experiences in that remote and beautiful place having led 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. That had been the compass of our quest, the rose-window topologies of the galactarian beehives of the dimethyltryptamine flash. 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. Everyone in our small expedition felt, I think, the sense of something opening around us, of the suspension of time as we turned and turned in a widening green world that was strangely and almost erotically alive all around us for thousands of miles. The jungle as mind, the world hanging in space as mind, images of order and sentient organization 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 Charrera went by. [wind howling] The next day, the first of March, passed 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 in 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 the water through the narrow channel at the upper end of the lake. The floating foam on the brown water served to mark the currents of the river, their many flows and counterflows. It was at this that Ev had exclaimed, for after minutes of watching the water flow by, suddenly a change had stolen over the moving marbled surface of the further side of the river. It seemed 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 from a discussion of 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 assurance 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 resignation was something new to me, perhaps enhanced by the mushroom, but developed during the month in Columbia preceding our trek into the jungle. As I walked I looked for a place to sit down. Dennis had offered me his journal entry for that day to read. One March, 1971. Last night I again triggered the phenomenon after having eaten one mushroom and smoking grass. It was almost identical to the first experience, a lifting, pulsing wave of vocal buzzes, 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 one that I know of, and he has discovered some interesting things. 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 a material like obsidian froth, which pours from the body, mouth, and sex organs as long as the sound continues. It is effervescent, phosphorescent, and indescribable. Here is where the linguistic metaphors become useless, for what the material actually is, is superlinguistic matter. It is a language, but not made of words, a language which becomes the thing 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 translinguistic matter to accomplish any reality, for to say anything in this voice is to cause that point to happen. 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 the mind, the metabolism of triptomine, 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 events that we are deriving from the stropharia, allows us to venture a not entirely wild guess as to what the sound which takes form may be. Hallucinogens, by affecting the neural matrix, can produce changes in consciousness in the temporal dimension. Clearly, consciousness can work changes in three dimensions as well. On triptomines it is possible, under special conditions, to hear and vocalize a sound that turns through a higher dimensional manifold and condenses as translinguistic matter, that is, matter reduplicated upon itself through time, much as a hologram is reduplicated through space. The substance whose appearance the sounds initiate is triptomine metabolized by mind through a higher spatial dimension. It is a hyperdimensional 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, homogenized into one thing via the higher dimensional alchemy of mind. Many questions occur concerning the phenomenology of this temporal hologram as fluid matrix. We speculate it is hyperdimensionally metabolized triptomine, an alchemical phenomenon which is a correct union of triptomine, 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 attunement 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 triptomine is produced. Is this substance mental as an idea is mental? Is it as real as an ordinary liquid like water? Harner insisted that Hivaro-Shamans, under the influence of MAO-inhibiting triptomines plus banisteriopsis copy infusions, produce a fluorescent liquid by means of which they accomplish all their magic. Though invisible to ordinary perception, this fluid is said to be visible to anyone who has ingested the brew. Yahé is frequently associated with violet auras and deep blue hallucinations. This may indicate a thermoplasma, perhaps only visible in the UV spectrum. If this phenomenon is found to fall into the category mental indicated above, it would function as described, but with the limitation of not being tangential to ordinary space-time. It will still represent perfected understanding of the hyperdimension, Jung named the collective unconscious. Perhaps only visible in the ultraviolet spectrum. 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 space-time, it will still represent perfected understanding of the hyperdimension, Jung named the collective unconscious. Looking back from a vantage point of nearly eight years on these notes makes them appear naive. At the time when I first read them, I doubted what I read, since it seemed to go against the grain of common sense, and at that time I could not really understand them. Today, after years of education pushed toward understanding the events at La Charrera, these ideas seem as magically near and yet as far as they did then. We had a theory, and we had experiences, and we linked them through an experiment that is preposterous, unless there is some seed of operational truth in the bizarre ideas born in that period. The years pass and the theories deepen. "What you call time is actually man," the oracular voice of the mushroom ventured recently to tell me. So it is that years later I still pursue and still do not understand the angelic glossolalia that Psilocybin makes possible for the thinking mind and the singing voice. Is it, I now wonder, an urge language of emotions that originates in that unexplored part of the brain that is a reflection of Broca's area but which is on the other, non-dominant side of the brain? Could there be a language so intense and so emotional that no cultural conventions of meaning would be necessary to understand? A language of emotion so intense that though it would be conveyed by vocal sound, its richness would be so great that it would be the equivalent of a telepathic ray? Today I think so, and with the aid of Psilocybin I labor carefully to perfect it. I believe that it is a subroutine of the human organism, an ancient shamanic art of using sound to convey incredible emotion, emotion so intense that its power is truly magical. Perhaps these ideas are no more than Dennis were then concerning the meaning of the powers of Psilocybin. What unites the two perceptions is the sense of a nearby mystery of tremendous importance. Elusive as the mystery has been, that sense of its imminence has never left my experience. Mysteries are not unsolved problems, they are things which in their very nature are mysterious. I would have not believed such a thing possible had I not been shown. 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 our ritual. Ev commented on the clarity of the night and we all stared together for a moment out into the galaxy, the night awash with millions of stars. We smoked in odd 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 around us there was a thick fog hugging the ground and only a few feet deep. Even as we watched, the condition thickened and spread outward, becoming finally a general fog over the whole area. We had come from depthless, 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. You mean to tell me that the heat of our joint started water condensing into visible fog right near us and that was like a chain reaction to all of the super-saturated air nearby? Who could believe it? Yes, that's it. Yes, that's it. And what is more, this is happening for a reason, or rather something. Maybe the mushroom is using it as an example. It is a way of showing us that small instabilities in the system can trigger large general fluctuations. This rap of Dennis's was very unsettling to me. I could not imagine that his explanation was correct or exactly what was going on. It passed through my mind then for the first time that he might be spacing out mentally. I used no psychoanalytical jargon in thinking about it, but I noted a reaction in myself to what he said that included the idea that he might be unfolding into a mythopoetic reality. 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 had a hallucination with her eyes closed of 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. The lapis philosophorum glimpsed in the Amazonian night, seemingly a great multidimensional jewel in the keeping of a teluric dwarf. The power of the image was deep and touching. I seemed to feel the hopes of the old alchemists, the puffers great and small who had sought the lapis in the cloudy swirling of their alembics. 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 me. It is the image of the stone as hyperdimensional jewel become UFO, the human soul become starship. It is the universal panacea at the end of time. All history, the shockwave of this final unveiling of the potential of the human psyche. These thoughts, these reveries seemed then like the stirring of something vast, something dimly sensed, stretched out over millions of years, something about the destiny of mankind 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 space seemed to swell and flow beneath our feet. The image of the earth hanging in space was everywhere emotionally superimposed on the situation around us. And what was that situation really? I slept thrilled and uneasy at the edge of sleep, then deep sleep and deep dreams from which nothing remained in the morning save the sense of yawning interstellar space. 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