[thunder]
 Chapter 11, The Experiment at La Chorrera
 The night was absolutely black.
 A low-lying cloud bank had appeared,
 muffling the small world of La Chorrera
 and wrapping it in a bowl of all-absorbing velvet darkness.
 Following the storm, we had rebuilt our fire
 and had driven off several liters of water
 from our infusion of Banisteriopsis capi,
 so it was much strengthened over what it had been before.
 We then added crushed leaves that Dennis had gathered
 that day near the choro
 and which we were using as DMT admixture plants.
 We did this because we had tentatively identified these plants
 as Justicia pectoralis variety Stenophylla,
 a plant commonly used as an admixture of yaw hay in the Valpais drainage.
 Now, years after that evening,
 I question both the concentration at which we brewed the Banisteriopsis
 and our identification of the admixture plant.
 There is no doubt that there was considerable harmine alkaloid in the infusion,
 but not so much as I later learned was necessary
 to provoke an unambiguous intoxication.
 The harmine alkaloids present were, in my opinion,
 boosted by the psilocybin accumulated in our systems,
 or rather, the MAO-inhibiting effect of the beta-carbolines
 caused the residual psilocybin to emerge into consciousness
 as a deep hallucinogenic experience.
 While I completed the boiling, Ev and Dennis went to their hammocks
 and lay down to await the completion of the preparations.
 We laughed together and talked softly.
 Yet in spite of this, there was an undercurrent of tension
 as we approached the experiment into which so much of our energy had been poured.
 It was very critical.
 They were becoming very clumsy and seemed to find their bodies hard to handle.
 It was that which had sent them to their hammocks.
 I said that I would do whatever needed attention.
 Our little hut on its stilts looked in the flickering firelight
 like a small spaceship dropped into the howling jungles of an alien world.
 We all felt like we were approaching hyperspatial overdrive.
 There was a sense of immense energies accumulating.
 The effect was reinforced by the hammocks hanging like acceleration slings
 ready to receive a starship's crew.
 Dennis lay in his hammock, nearly unable to hold a pencil,
 but writing furiously in tight operational terms about the experiment just ahead.
 The mushroom is presently metabolizing within our bodies.
 This has keyed in on the tryptamine template in the living mushroom
 and it has been sensitized for the condensation of the harmine psilocybin DNA molecule.
 When the yage is ingested, the harmine analog will start to metabolize within the body.
 The ESR of the pre-sensitized psilocybin circuit will immediately cancel the ESR of the harmine
 and cause it to bond superconductively to the DNA-RNA complex
 both in our bodies and in the mushroom simultaneously in a higher dimension.
 The bonding completed, the harmine DNA memory bank and drive unit
 will condense into the waiting, charred psilocybin circuit in the mushroom.
 We will see this condensation as it will appear in the mushroom
 at the same instant that the bond is completed in a higher dimension.
 We will see this condensation as it will appear in the mushroom
 at the same instant that the bond is completed in a higher dimension.
 Dennis explained that he was unable to move very well
 because something having to do with the backward flow of time
 and the ever-increasing constraints on the set of possible futures
 had rendered him nearly immobile.
 Only the mind, planning and computing was free.
 I finished boiling the yage.
 I ground the admixture plants and added them to the cooling brew.
 I moved the yage into the hut, then the mushroom.
 Those things in place, we were ready to begin.
 Prior to this point, we had taken no hallucinogens for several days.
 The effects we were experiencing were not arising from that source.
 Something else was happening.
 Dennis was now narrating our countdown toward an omega point
 that none of us could really understand.
 We were completely transformed with the expectation
 that possibly we would witness the outbreak of the millennium.
 He said that time was appearing to slow down as we approached this point,
 as proof or rather witness to this amazing assertion.
 He called our attention to the candle that I had set upon a small shelf
 jutting from the wall of the hut.
 Unattended, its slight tilt had become slowly exaggerated
 so that now it hung at a crazy angle, defying gravity,
 because, he said, time was passing so slowly
 that we could not see that it was actually in the act of falling.
 I walked closer to this apparition and bent toward the flame.
 It appeared still, absolutely frozen.
 My mind shot back to the moment above the river
 when it too had seemed stilled forever.
 The flame was uncanny.
 As deeply as I cared to look into it,
 I could see no movement of particles or gas.
 We, or I, seemed to have my usual freedom of movement,
 but the world around me was coming to a crystalline and eerie halt.
 It was Dennis who finally spoke.
 A series of quantized energy levels have to be broken through
 in order to bond this thing.
 It is part mythology, part psychology, part applied physics.
 Who knows?
 We will make three attempts before we break out of the experimental mode.
 We all drank the yagé, sending it churning through our guts.
 Dennis took only one mushroom so that he could hear the tone.
 Darkness was utter, and we had no clocks.
 It seemed hours since Dave and Vanessa had left us.
 All was finally in readiness.
 The living mushroom, the harmine brew, the harmine smoking mixture.
 After we each had taken a half a cup of the yagé infusion,
 we settled down to wait.
 Dennis had been hearing the ESR tone
 that he deemed the sine qua non of what we were attempting
 for the past several days.
 After about 15 minutes, he announced that he could hear it more clearly
 and that it was gaining strength.
 He felt prepared to attempt the experiment at any time, he said.
 We agreed that each time, during the actual making of the sound,
 we would extinguish the candle
 so that we would not have our minds burdened
 with any tryptamine-induced facial distortions
 that the odd yelling might cause.
 Years before, there had been episodes involving DMT
 and spasms of facial musculature
 that were fairly hair-raising for the observer,
 involving, as they did, the entities of tantric Buddhism,
 the bulging eyes, the rolling and possibly long tongues,
 that sort of thing.
 Dennis rose up in his hammock then.
 The candle went out, and he sounded his first howl of hypercarbulation.
 It was mechanical and loud, like a bull roars,
 and ended with a convulsive spasm that traveled throughout his body
 and landed him out of his hammock on the floor.
 We relit the candle only long enough to determine
 that everyone wanted to continue
 and agreed that Dennis's next attempt
 should be made from a sitting position on the floor of the hut.
 This was done, again, a long, whirring yodel,
 strange and unexpectedly mechanical each time it was sounded.
 [Yodeling]
 I suggested a break before the third attempt,
 but Dennis was quite agitated and eager to "bring it through," as he put it.
 We settled in for the third yell, and when it came,
 it was like the others, but lasted much longer and became much louder.
 It was like an electric siren wailing atomic attack
 over the still night jungle.
 [Yodeling]
 [Siren]
 It went on and on.
 [Siren]
 [Siren]
 [Siren]
 And when it finally died away,
 that, too, was like the dying away of a siren.
 Then, there in the absolute darkness of our Amazon hut, was silence,
 the silence of the transition from one world to another,
 the silence of the Gidnego Gap.
 [Yodeling]
 And then, the sound of the crowing of a cock,
 the cock at the mission.
 Three times his call came, clear but from afar,
 seeming to confirm us as actors on a stage,
 part of a dramatic contrivance.
 Dennis had said that if the experiment were successful,
 the mushroom would be obliterated,
 the low temperature phenomena would explode the cellular material,
 and what would be left would be a standing wave,
 a violet ring of light the size of the mushroom cap.
 That would be the holding mode of the lens, or whatever it was.
 Then, someone would take command of it,
 whose DNA it is, they are it.
 It is a mind which can be seen and held in one's hand.
 It is indestructible, it is all space and time,
 the universe, but a monad, a monadic plasma,
 which contains all space and time, including one's own mind.
 Dennis leaned toward the mushroom, standing on the raised experiment area.
 "Look!"
 As I followed his gaze, he raised his arm,
 and across the fully expanded cap of the mushroom
 fell the shadow of his Ruana,
 clearly, but only for a moment, as the shadow bisected the glowing carpaphore,
 I saw, not a mature mushroom, but a planet,
 the earth, lustrous and live, blue and tan and dazzling white.
 "It is our world!"
 His voice was full of unfathomable emotion.
 I could only nod.
 I did not understand, but I saw it clearly,
 although my vision was only a thing of a moment.
 "We have succeeded!"
 I don't understand, and I did not.
 Let's walk to the pasture, I need to think.
 [footsteps]
 Ev was exhausted by the night's activities,
 probably glad to have us leave her in the hut with the encroaching dawn
 promising some sort of new day.
 As we led ourselves down the log ladder to the ground,
 I was struck by the scene of utter confusion
 that our activities had left behind
 during the last frantic hours of brewing the night before.
 Our huge fire was now only white ashes.
 The waste from the aje-making was piled beside it,
 looking like a mound of beeched seaweed.
 Everything seemed strewn about.
 This we walked through, shaking the stiffness out of our bodies
 and stopping at the small stream that crossed the path
 to splash water in our faces.
 We had not spoken.
 It was Dennis who broke the silence.
 "You are wondering if we succeeded?"
 "Yes, what happened?"
 "Your writing heard on this effect, so what's going on?"
 "Well, I'm not sure how, but I know we have succeeded.
 Let me try to understand this."
 As we walked on, my own mind was racing with questions,
 and as we walked along, Dennis' occasional comments were,
 it burst over me,
 answers to questions that I was thinking, but not articulating.
 I stopped in my tracks.
 I clearly formed a question in my mind.
 Dennis, headbent beside me, began to answer
 without waiting for me to articulate my thought aloud.
 I was dumbfounded.
 Was this it, then, I asked,
 that he had somehow acquired telepathic powers?
 No, there was more to it than that.
 According to Dennis, the bonding of the harmine into his DNA
 had given him immediate access
 to an enormous cybernetically stored fund of information,
 and this information was freely available to anyone in the world
 who looked into their mind
 and prefaced their question with the word "Dennis."
 The absurdity of the second half of this proposition
 struck me as utterly too much,
 but naturally, at his insistence, I made the test.
 I picked up a small plant growing at my feet
 and closed my eyes and asked,
 "Dennis, what is the name of this plant?"
 Immediately, and without any effort of my own that I was aware of,
 a scientific name, now forgotten, popped into my head.
 I tried the same thing again with a different plant,
 and to my amazement received a different answer.
 The experiment seemed to secure
 that something was giving answers in my head,
 but I could not tell if they were correct or not.
 I was shaken.
 When we had left the hut on this walk,
 I was sure that we had failed
 and that we had to talk over revising our approach.
 I even felt relief,
 since the obsessive nature of it all had been a strain.
 But now, as we walked along,
 and I could hear a voice in my head that was answering,
 however innamely or inaccurately,
 any question put to it, I was less sure.
 Dennis was oddly preoccupied,
 yet he assured me that his effort had succeeded
 and that all over the world,
 the wave of hypercarbolation was sweeping through the human race,
 eliminating the distinction between the individual and the community,
 as everyone discovered themselves spontaneously pushing off
 into a telepathic ocean
 whose name was that of its discoverer,
 Dennis McKenna.
 As I watched my mind and listened to my brother rave,
 I began to realize that the experiment had indeed unleashed
 some sort of bizarre effect.
 Why it was that I was able to make the leap
 from assuming that we were having a peculiar localized experience
 to the idea that we were key parts of a mankind-wide phenomena
 is an important unanswered question,
 speaking volumes about my susceptibility to suggestion at that moment.
 I was quite simply the victim of a cognitive hallucination,
 that is, rather than a visual experience of something not actually present,
 a hallucination that is a total shift of the highest levels
 of our cognitive relationship to the world.
 The psilocybin-induced cognitive hallucination
 made the impossible and unlikely seem probable and reasonable.
 I was becoming flooded with ecstasy
 as the realization came over me that we had passed the Omega Point
 and that we were now operating in the first few moments of the millennium.
 Both of us could feel the excitement in us
 rising toward the realization that the world was now somehow radically different,
 totally different, in a fundamental way.
 Dennis spoke.
 So, this must be it.
 We have not condensed the stone into visible space,
 but we have generated it in our heads.
 It does not immediately appear as a visible vehicle,
 but first as a teaching,
 the teaching we hear in our heads right now, later.
 The word will be made flesh.
 Flesh.
 I could only stare at my brother.
 Who is he, and how is he able to know and do these things?
 I could only wonder.
 Now, Mother and possibly lots of dead people will be showing up soon.
 Young, he will doubtless come, and Einstein too,
 and by God, I want to hear what they have to say.
 We were embracing each other and laughing.
 I felt as though I was being led like a little child.
 For no reason I had ceased to question.
 Rather, I felt an urge to see other people
 and feel their immersion in the new heaven and the new earth.
 Dennis agreed.
 I would go to the river and get Dave and Vanessa,
 and he would return to the camp and Ev,
 and explain to her what was happening.
 I would return with them to the forest.
 As I set out toward the river,
 I seemed to myself to be nearly weightless.
 I felt reborn.
 I felt full of energy and bursting with good health and vitality.
 Over a period of a few minutes,
 I had passed from weary disgruntled skeptic to ecstatic believer.
 Looking back on it,
 I believe that for me this was the critical juncture.
 Why did I not question Dennis more closely?
 Was I somehow self-hypnotized?
 Did the unfamiliar setting, the restricted diet,
 strain and expectations push me into a place
 where I was unable to resist participation of a sort
 in the world of my brother's bizarre ideation?
 Why was I unable to maintain my detached and skeptical viewpoint?
 In some sense, this willing suspension of disbelief
 is the crux of the matter,
 and, I believe, of many a close encounter situation.
 The other plays with us
 and approaches us through the imagination,
 and then a critical juncture is reached.
 To go beyond this juncture requires abandonment of will and habit.
 At that moment, the world turns lazily inside out,
 and what was hidden is revealed.
 A magical modality,
 a different epigenetic landscape than one has known,
 a landscape become real.
 The UFO is a creature of this previously invisible landscape.
 It is lord of the skies of the imagination,
 able to carry anyone with it who will but play,
 and then let the play deepen and deepen.
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 I walked on toward the river.
 As I walked along, I did some experiments.
 I said, "Terrence, Terrence."
 It was very much like talking to yourself.
 Then I said, "Dennis."
 And the thing was instantly there, just ready to do business.
 Then I said, "McKenna, McKenna."
 And it was still there.
 I realized that I couldn't reach it with my first name,
 but I could reach it with my last name.
 I could not understand what was going on.
 I was pondering these kinds of things
 when I arrived at the Riverside house of Vanessa and Dave.
 They were still in their hammocks, asleep,
 but crowded around the door, even this early in the morning,
 were a group of "Why die do we toto" children.
 As I pushed my way through them, my gaze fell on each,
 and I thought, "You are enlightened, and you, and you."
 My arrival was the first event of the day for Dave and Vanessa.
 I told them that we had succeeded,
 that success was not a condensed hyperobject, but a teaching.
 I asked them to dress and come with me.
 While they were gathering their hammocks,
 they told me that during the darkest part of the night,
 Dave had awakened, hysterical,
 in a state not unlike the condition induced in him
 by the electrical storm the evening before.
 They had been very agitated during the night
 and could only attribute this to what we had been doing.
 I was interested in all of this,
 but seemed to hear it as from a long distance.
 I wanted to return to the forest and see what else would unfold.
 In my mind, I was recalling something else
 Dennis had said a few minutes before in the pasture.
 He had said that the demarcation between day and night,
 the dawn line, was now making a 24-hour sweep around the world,
 a sweep that began at the dawn moment
 when the experiment at La Charrera was finished.
 Throughout the world, traffic and factories were coming to a halt.
 People were standing around and realizing
 that someone, somewhere, had broken through,
 that this was not a day like any other day.
 Dave and Vanessa followed me back to the forest,
 grumbling a good part of the way.
 When we had gone slightly past the place where I had parted from Dennis,
 we came upon something which could not at first be fitted
 into any set of expectations.
 This was Dennis's rihuana and shirt,
 discarded in the middle of the path.
 Next came a pair of pants,
 and then further on, two sweat socks.
 And, though I was to learn this only later,
 his glasses and his boots had also been hurled away.
 Following this trail of cast-off garments
 led us back to the hut in the forest.
 There we found Dev and Dennis,
 both naked and sitting on the floor of the hut,
 discussing and doing the "Ask Dennis" meditation.
 With the comment that you cannot receive a proper initiation
 unless you are naked,
 Dennis insisted that we take off our clothes.
 Vanessa peeled, and Dave and I followed her example.
 The presence of the mushroom was there,
 and it seemed to be saying, "Take off your clothes!
 "Throw everything away! Everything is breaking!
 "All objects are no good to you now.
 "Throw everything away. You do not need it anymore."
 We all looked at each other,
 glossy pubic hair and secret genitals now in the sunshine.
 I rolled a joint then.
 We sat in a circle and smoked.
 We told Dave and Vanessa about the teaching
 and urged them to try it, with varying degrees of success,
 since a voice in the head is a very subjective thing.
 If one has it, there is no doubt.
 If one does not have it, it seems a very murky thing.
 Everything was very amicable,
 except that Dennis was showing a tendency
 to talk right through other people's comments
 as if they were not present.
 It was as though he were on a different time track
 from the rest of us,
 since he really seemed unable to realize
 that someone else was talking.
 We thought that it was logical to untie our hammocks from the house
 and take nothing but our hammocks
 and go naked into the jungle,
 tie the hammocks in a tree,
 and then get into these hammocks.
 We would then explore the mode,
 because clearly you could do more than ask or answer questions.
 The door was standing open.
 God alone knew what one could do.
 I asked the thing in my mind what should be done
 and had received instruction
 that we should visually meditate on our lives,
 and, starting from the present,
 trace 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 be somehow free in the dimension of absolute freedom
 that seemed so near.
 Lying in our hammocks,
 we set out to meditate our way to hyperspace.
 I could see myself at La Charrera,
 then going down the trail to El Encanto,
 up the river to Leguizamo,
 and back to Bogota, back to Canada,
 and 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 there in 3D.
 It's all over now, it's all over!"
 I could see people.
 Immediately I reached out for all of them.
 I seemed to be able to reach them.
 "We're in the Amazon," I explained to each,
 "and now we're going home, or some place."
 The vision had an utterly bizarre quality.
 Tears welled up behind my closed eyelids.
 It was very peculiar.
 The voice of the teacher spoke in my head.
 "You've found it! This is it!
 It's all over now, there is no more.
 Within a few hours,
 the superstructure of human civilization is going to collapse
 and your species is going to go to Jupiter and then to the stars.
 A day of high adventure dawns for man at last!"
 [laughter]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 At first the images welling up behind closed eyes
 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 the hammock had induced.
 We were talking and talking, analyzing and analyzing.
 Dennis seemed most out of it.
 Dave and Vanessa, uncertain that anything at all had really happened.
 Ev was distant and I was feeling definitely
 immersed in the surreal perception that had been mine
 since the chaotic opening of the day.
 Something was wrong.
 Expectation was outrunning reality.
 Nothing had happened.
 It came out that no one could hear Dennis in their mind, except me.
 They were all actually wondering what was going on.
 We had entered the next phase, which was a period of confusion for all.
 Dennis was disengaging from reality.
 I would talk to him and he didn't know anyone was speaking to him.
 He was still breaking into conversations
 because he didn't know anyone else was speaking.
 A visit to the priest's outdoor shower was suggested and seized upon
 since we were all filthy and covered with the grime of fire-tending.
 We gathered up our scattered clothing,
 and during this effort it came out that Dennis had thrown his glasses away,
 along with his boots and everything else.
 Disheveled and disoriented, we set off,
 searching unsuccessfully for the lost pair of glasses
 as we retraced our path to the mission.
 We were a group of people of many minds about the previous several hours,
 some assuming that this was a day like any other,
 others assuming that this was the first day of the age at the end of time.
 A group of Witoto gazed at us as we passed
 and then roared with appreciative laughter.
 "They know, they know what has been achieved,"
 the voice in my head assured me.
 They were certainly beaming and chortling about something.
 On we walked toward the mission and its shower in the sunshine.
 Dennis would not stop talking.
 The consensus was building that we had a crisis on our hands,
 but it wasn't yet out of control.
 We agreed that Yahé is very peculiar
 and thought that the passage of a few hours would smooth everything out.
 That was everyone's conclusion except Dennis and my own.
 It was no longer really possible to communicate with Dennis.
 My conclusion was that something had happened,
 that he had done something,
 that some kind of odd principle had been manipulated.
 But it wasn't as we thought it was,
 and so we were cast we knew not where.
 I was calm.
 I was at least participating in the social situation.
 Even though there were tears of joy streaming down my face,
 I wasn't out of touch with reality.
 I said, "We'll wait for tomorrow.
 Dennis will come down."
 Everyone seemed to be finding their way
 back to their normal psychic equilibrium,
 save Dennis and myself.
 I was burdened with odd but wonderfully expanded perceptions,
 while his wandering ideas and wild eyes
 indicated that he was having some difficulty
 in getting his feet on the ground.
 After our shower and on the way back to the forest,
 I mentioned all of these things to him,
 but he replied in riddles and with mimicry of dead relatives
 so that I could get nothing out of him.
 I continued to assume that a night's sleep would set him right.
 I insisted that he rest in his hammock when we returned to the camp,
 which he did, while the rest of us set things in order.
 [Indistinct chatter]
 [Indistinct chatter]
 [Indistinct chatter]
 [Indistinct chatter]
 He fizzled


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.66 sec
Decoding  : 3.25 sec
Transcribe: 2352.36 sec
Total Time: 2356.26 sec