Chapter 12 In the Vortex
 It was decided that Vanessa and Dave would stay the night at our hut, so their two hammocks
 were left hanging along with our three.
 It was a crowded situation.
 We dined well that evening, and except for the occasional oblique or plain incomprehensible
 comment from Dennis, the surface of things seemed to be restored.
 Vanessa's ankle remained bad, and much attention was directed toward this difficulty, almost
 in tribute to its being so palpable in contrast to most of what was going on.
 I felt utterly changed and made new, removed from everyone and content to let events unfold
 as they would, assured by the new thing inside of me that however things appeared, all was
 very, very well.
 The last rave of this long amazing day came after dinner in the firelight, when 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 reassemble in our perfected astral forms on the bridge of a starship that was
 in geosynchronous orbit twenty-two thousand miles above the Amazon basin.
 This was the second of the self-limiting prophecies that had been made since the experiment.
 The first had been the effort to meditate backward to one's birth attempted that morning.
 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 eschatological transformation.
 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, still very elusive.
 The idea of a dimension-roving lens-vehicle, once articulated, was never far away.
 This statement was also the first appearance of the UFO image in Dennis' thought since
 the experiment, a theme to be articulated in a thousand ways in the days that were to
 follow.
 The equation "Lapis = Self = UFO" was the operating assumption of Dennis' long voyage
 of self-discovery and return.
 With these images of death in sleep and rebirth inside a starship ringing in our minds, we
 turned in, thoroughly exhausted.
 I stressed that the hut was crowded with hammocks strung from every available beam.
 It was difficult to move about without communicating that to one's neighbors through the tugging
 and twisting of the many ropes.
 We must have retired about ten o'clock.
 I slept soundly until sometime many hours later that I took to be two or so.
 I rose to take the traditional middle-of-the-night piss that the use of condensed milk induces
 in the explorer.
 I sat up in my hammock, struggled for matches, and then 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 shimmering out from the candle flame for
 a distance of about four feet.
 It was an intense iridescent blue alternating 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 of that subject by Matthias Grunewald.
 I understood that he 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 that I was seeing
 was an effect caused by the distortion of psychic space-time induced by our experiment
 and the nearby 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 from light
 from a candle to act as a detector of the philosopher's stone.
 I thought of Diogenes prospecting for the good.
 Was that what he was doing?
 I thought of the phrase, "It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness,"
 and I laughed.
 I awakened Eve, 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 to my hammock, I counted heads and noticed that everyone was present
 and seemingly completely asleep.
 I lay awake a long time, thinking.
 All seemed still.
 As breakfast unfolded the following morning, the 6th of March, it became clear that the
 restful sleep I had imagined we had all shared the night before had been anything but that.
 From Dennis's still disorganized but ample comments, it emerged that he had or imagined
 he had a very active night.
 Closely questioned, it came out that he was completely convinced that sometime during
 the night he had risen and dressed and then had a series of nocturnal adventures that
 involved going alone in the darkness to the thundering immensity of the Choro over a mile
 away, then returning to climb and spend some time in a large tree near the edge of a mission
 before 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 glasses,
 falling in and out of shamanic ecstasy, perhaps howling and otherwise paleolithically comporting
 himself was too much for me.
 It was a breach of the collective cool, and even though I was 90% certain that it had
 never really happened, I was determined to eliminate all possibility of such rambles
 in the future.
 Dennis's story was an amazing description of a shamanic night journey.
 He said he had gone to the Choro and meditated in the mission cemetery we had visited before.
 He had begun to return to camp when he confronted a particularly large, more racious tree near
 where the path skirted the edge of the mission.
 On impulse he had climbed it, not at all unaware that the ascent of the world tree is the central
 motif of Siberian shamanic journeying.
 As he climbed the tree he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes, and finally
 as he reached the highest point in his ascent, something which he called the vortex opened
 ahead of him like a swirling enormous doorway into time, he could see the cyclopean megaliths
 of Stonehenge, and beyond those ringed stones revolving at a different speed and at higher
 plane, the outline of the pyramids, marble-faceted and gleaming as they have not done since the
 days of pharaonic Egypt, and yet further into the turbulent maw of the vortex he saw, to
 mysteries ancient long before the advent of man, titanic 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 space and eon-consuming time, rushed down
 upon him, he fainted, and time, who can say how much time, passed 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, exultation,
 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 space swirling the artifacts of twenty
 thousand years of human striving into a vortex of apocalyptic contradictions, in that state
 of fear and exultation in the depth of man'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 passed since the attempt to hypercarbolate human DNA, it was apparent
 that Dennis was not pulling out of the induced state of shamanic excitement as quickly as
 we had anticipated, two choices presented themselves to explain the situation, the strain
 of the journey and the recent psilocybin tripping had contributed to activate a shamanic archetype
 in Dennis that had been latent all along but which was now overt and carrying a strong
 transference potential to which I was succumbing by being unable to recognize my brother's
 condition as a potentially pathological state, this was the position that Vanessa and Dave
 leaned toward and was the source of much of our difference of opinion on how to proceed.
 A second explanation takes a biochemical rather than a psychological approach, it says that
 Dennis had, through his unusual diet of drugs and the experiment he performed, 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 MAO, monoamine oxidase 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,
 however the compounds in Banisteriopsis copy are known to usually reverse their MAO inhibition
 in four to six hours, nevertheless as subsequent events show this explanation is doubtless
 some part of the true story.
 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 he did in a single moment somehow bind all the MAO in his body
 and that his long derangement was due to the lag time that was required to rebuild his
 MAO level from a complete and sudden depletion, I believe that this sudden depletion was caused
 by his experiment and that vocally induced resonance cancelling 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 psilocybin
 and his voice and will.
 If this is true then the implication for humanity may be every bit as great as we in our inflated
 state of mind supposed, since it hints at a means by which mankind might explore the
 parallel continuum whose interaction with our own existence is signified by the visionary
 experience, it may well be the effect that is the crack in a door that once flung open
 will lead us to all the worlds teeming in our dreams and imaginations, 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 cancelling that Dennis was so intrigued by.
 Breakfast of the second day following the experiment was closed with a hot discussion
 of whether Dennis had really gone to the choro or only dreamed that he had done so, as the
 rhetoric exhausted itself Vanessa drew me away from the hut and walked along with me
 as I went to the spring for water, we were 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 the subject I will defer in favour 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 theory had to come forth with an operational prediction
 on that vital point, I understood from Vanessa's demeanour that we should be 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 being announced as a faint but
 growing theme, it all fell into place from the second day onward, Ev became a kind of
 liaison with the rest of the world of La Charrera, 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, and thus was the
 stage set for the next five days from the 5th to the 10th of March, the chaos at La
 Charrera, during this time Dennis very slowly got better, he became more coherent, he said
 that the experience had catapulted him to the edge of the Riemannian topology of the
 universe, that he had to come back in and that he 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, there was no doubt about it, he could do perfect
 voice imitations of our mother and father, he became all these people doing it perfectly
 and there was much more, a vision of 20th century history, building the lens and the
 end of time, he said that the discovery of a higher physical dimension was ahead of us
 a few years in time, but somehow linked up to Egypt, to Acacia tryptamine cults, to Tibet
 eight thousand years ago, to Punpo shamanic magic, all these ideas in constant circulation
 and he talked and performed constantly, no notes exist from that period, so filled was
 I with the assumption 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 I
 would write a poem, but that moment never came, nothing is coherent or connected from
 those five days, I remember that they were the most intense times that I have ever gone
 through, and that 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 week 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 glasses his eyes were wild and unsettling to look into, since the night of his contested
 shamanic ramble I had formed the intention not to sleep, but to stand watch constantly
 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 after the experience the lack of a need for sleep
 for nine days which I personally underwent, seemed to me the most solid argument for the
 reality of the forces that we experimented with, for I did not merely not need to sleep,
 but was constantly thinking in a rich, calm, image-filled way that made my normal thought
 process seem a pale and jerkily animated shadow of the mental power that I felt 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 that followed upon my decision not to sleep was passed 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 that I felt was exactly the time when
 we had performed the experiment two days before, I heard Dennis stir in his hammock inside
 the hut.
 Then I heard, low but strong and clear, the same ululating howl that had catapulted us
 into a new world forty-eight hours before.
 Three times it sounded, just as something in my mind assured 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 cock crow drifting across the whitening air from
 the mission.
 Why did these 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 titanic days began, the thing in
 my mind stirring to meet the challenge to reason that each new moment seemed charged
 with.
 All that remains of those times are images and incidents, only metaphors acted as sustained
 themes.
 All was mythmaking and image-making, mercurial, meta-leveled, ever-flowing.
 the world.
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