(fireworks popping)
 (fireworks popping)
 (fireworks popping)
 (fireworks popping)
 (fireworks popping)
 - Chapter 13, at play in the fields of the Lord.
 Ev returned with Dave and Vanessa to the river that morning,
 and for the first time in two days,
 Dennis and I were alone, and the atmosphere was one of calm.
 I busied myself sorting through and arranging the equipment.
 Our campsite was again spic and span.
 Dennis was alternately calm or into long harangs
 on a supra-cosmic scale,
 a la the star maker of Olaf Stapleton.
 He imitated, personified, described,
 and otherwise invoked immense Gnostic and Manichean entities
 that were struggling on a cosmic scale,
 but not without humor,
 occasionally moaning out that he felt like an old Mandaean.
 Then he would collapse with laughter at this cleverness.
 I sat in my hammock and verbally participated
 as much as I could in all of this,
 though it was clear that Dennis had no difficulty
 in maintaining a conversation on his own.
 In fact, he seemed to have hit the main vein
 of the fountain of sprung verse.
 I closed my eyes for a moment,
 and there, fully formed beneath my eyelids,
 was the first of what I call teachings or messages.
 It was a beautiful recursive geometric form.
 The voice in my mind informed me
 that this was the Valentine curve,
 obviously the four petals of the curve
 look somewhat like a valentine or a bleeding heart.
 I thought for an instant of the heart-shaped fruit
 I had fashioned into a water pipe,
 no obvious connection, the image slid.
 I went and got my notebook and drew the valentine curve.
 At first crudely, later much more smoothly,
 it made me think of Basil Valentine, an alchemist,
 author of the triumphal chariot of antinomy.
 I had read the book,
 but could remember virtually nothing about it.
 I thought too of Valentinus,
 Alexandrian Gnostic of the second century,
 and his doctrine that the material world
 was the condensed emotion of the errant Sophia,
 who had selfishly created a universe
 without undergoing any union, but with herself.
 The condensation of emotion into matter,
 the theme was hair-raising.
 It was the theme that had brought us to the Amazon,
 and alchemy was the gnosis of material transformation.
 Clues seemed everywhere.
 Everything was webbed together in a magical fabric
 of meaning and affirmation and mystery.
 Thoughts and ideas of all sorts
 formed in my mind unbidden,
 and would lead inevitably to some further expansion
 of the set of themes that we had organized our lives around.
 The first day, the voice inside my head
 suggested that I set out the record I had kept
 for several years of my I Ching throws,
 it having been for several years my habit
 to throw the I Ching at each new and full moon,
 and to record the throws on a slip of paper,
 which I kept inside the back cover of my copy.
 At the prompting of the inner voice,
 I went through this record of throws,
 looking for an instance when I had thrown the first hexagram.
 Finding that, I returned to the beginning of the list,
 looking now for a record of the second hexagram being thrown,
 and so on.
 My list of throws covered three years
 and contained about 80 throws and their changes.
 After about a half hour of this exercise,
 I had determined that according to my record,
 I had thrown all of the 64 hexagrams
 in the three years leading up to that moment.
 This mildly interesting unlikelihood
 was very significant seeming to me.
 It proved that I had a kind of secret identity
 that I was in the process of uncovering.
 It proved that I was somehow a reflection of the microcosm
 and had been chosen somehow to be in the situation
 in which I found myself.
 I was extremely agitated at this personal verification
 of the ordered pattern whose design I was discovering
 everywhere in my life.
 I composed myself, and then at the strong prompting
 of the inner wave of understanding,
 I quietly burned the record of my I Ching throws.
 It was a very uncharacteristic thing for me to do.
 Dennis watched all of this and then delivered himself
 of but one of the many riddles that he was to propound
 over the next few days.
 "What can you do with a hole in a stick
 that you can't do with a stick in a hole?"
 He bellowed across the sandy expanse
 to where I stood by the fire.
 The answer involved the idea that a pipe
 was the vehicle of dimensional travel,
 and that was what you could do.
 And thus the first day of the reversal passed.
 A reasonable conclusion would have been to suppose
 that Dennis was toxically schizophrenic
 and that we should leave the Amazon.
 What muddied the water considerably was me,
 because I was comparatively normal except for one thing.
 I insisted that everything was all right
 and that Dennis somehow knew exactly what he was doing.
 It was okay, I insisted.
 He had done what he set out to do,
 and now people should try to relax.
 The reason I felt this way was because it had become
 very clear that though I had not known anything
 about how he had done the experiment or the theory,
 that from the dawn moment when we had piled out
 of our hammocks to look at the mushroom,
 something was very bizarre about me.
 Something had happened to me, it was true.
 I was in a very strange place.
 It was because of having close contact
 with the thing that was like a teacher.
 It let me know things.
 Beyond any possibility of argument,
 I knew things which I couldn't possibly know.
 Ev had gone through the experiment,
 but nothing at all had happened to her.
 The other people seemed very distant.
 They couldn't understand at all what was happening
 and preferred to reject us.
 Everyone behaved oddly.
 Everyone thought everyone else was crazy,
 but everyone relative to their own normal behavior
 behaved very oddly.
 The main thing the teacher said was,
 "Do not worry, do not worry, because there is something
 "that you have to get straight about.
 "Your brother will recover.
 "Your companions will take care of him.
 "Do not worry, but listen, you have to get this down."
 Within hours after the experiment,
 this started impinging on me,
 something that I must figure out.
 The next morning, Dennis seemed to me
 slightly more down to earth,
 but to a degree so slight over the day before
 that it was a matter of opinion
 whether he had made any improvement at all.
 I noticed with interest that while he seemed disoriented
 and his ideation was in structure as wild and woolly as ever,
 in content there had been a definite sort of improvement.
 On the day before, he had seemed to be spread
 over so vast an amount of space and time
 that there was little to be identified
 out of the cosmic churning that he was undergoing.
 The day before, to find even our own galaxy in his mind
 had been impossible.
 On the second day, he awoke within the galaxy
 and his visions and fantasies remained within it.
 Had that been the only instance
 of his telescoping back into himself,
 it would not be worth noting,
 but the fact was that each step of his return
 to a normal state of mind was accomplished this way.
 The day after he reached the confines of the galaxy,
 he entered the solar system,
 condensing through its planets over several days
 until he identified only with the earth.
 Coalescing and condensing through the ecology
 of his home world,
 he came to think of himself as all humanity
 and was able to vividly relive all of its history.
 Later still, he became the embodiment
 of all the members of our vast and peculiar Irish family.
 Again later, he was resolved down
 into only our immediate family.
 And from there to the resolution of the dualism
 involved in the question
 as to whether he was Dennis or Terence.
 And finally, and thankfully,
 he came to rest with the realization that he was Dennis,
 returned from the edge of the universe of mind,
 restored and reborn,
 a shaman in the fullest sense of the word.
 But that recovery was 20 days into the future
 from the morning of the 7th of March
 when we walked to the pasture,
 just as we had on the morning after the experiment.
 We walked to the top of a small rise
 on which grew a young tree.
 Ama, the Wetoto word for brother,
 had become one of the many new nicknames
 that Dennis had created for me.
 Now, as we walked along,
 we kept our eyes open for mushrooms
 as had become our habit,
 even though all thought of eating mushrooms
 was now behind us.
 Dennis strode ahead of me and made his way to this tree.
 Bending down and parting the grasses
 at the base of the tree,
 he pointed to the letters A-M-A carved in the bark.
 It was carving at least several years old.
 The incident was confusing.
 How had Dennis known the carving was there
 and what did it mean anyway?
 He answered my questions by sweeping his hand
 toward the dawn horizon
 and announcing that this was the planet Venus
 or the archetypal world of Venus.
 I had no idea which.
 These assertions that flew completely
 in the face of reason were very hard to take
 and would enkindle in me brief stabs of despair
 for his state of mind,
 though most of the time I was able to convince myself
 that he was improving and returning
 from the unseen world so vivid to him
 that he could see nothing else.
 The idea of the recreation of the scattered self
 as an alchemical act with immense personal
 and historical significance
 was the tack that I used in trying to direct
 the developing fantasy of my brother.
 Each morning for several days after the 5th of March,
 we would walk to the pasture
 and I would demand of him the stone.
 Neither of us perceived these goings-on
 through anything like the light of normal consciousness.
 The world seemed filled with a near-bending wonder
 and power that assured me that all things were possible
 and that the course of things in the light of this
 were moving in the right direction.
 Be amazed at nothing.
 You are to receive the kingship of the Father.
 I watched my own understanding of the connections
 between what we were doing and classical alchemy
 move by vast intuitive leaps
 to implicate Gerhard Dorn, Robert Flood,
 and Count Michael Mayer.
 The 36th emblem of Mayer's Atalanta Fugiennes
 is a wonderful visual pun
 that connects the cube of Stropharia Cubensis
 with the UFO, the hyperobject seen in the sky.
 It was an image that was constantly before me
 through those times.
 John Dee with his scrying stone and the hieroglyphic monad
 is mixed up in the same set of images.
 Why did this circle get deeper into the mystery
 than did their contemporaries and competition?
 Nicholas Flamel and his wife,
 their legendary love affair and their unknown end.
 Mutus Lieber, a couple working at a furnace.
 It almost looks as though they are drying mushrooms.
 Just how sophisticated did alchemy become
 before enlightenment science scattered the adepts
 and rendered their control language inoperable?
 So that in the pasture each foggy morning
 when I demanded of Dennis
 that he give me the philosopher's stone,
 it was both pressure upon him
 to reformulate his consciousness into a unity
 and a thing which served as the focus
 for the transference potential that was so intense
 as to again and again threaten to engulf us.
 Not sleeping, being awake constantly,
 I was in the world of the developing situation at La Charrera
 but also in another world
 into which my brother had become psychotopologically enmeshed,
 a world of a dimensional vortex
 beyond which seemed to be eternity,
 the land of the dead, all human history and the UFOs.
 It was a world whose unseen cybernetic chroniclers
 spoke telepathically in our minds
 and revealed that we and all humanity
 were in the act of becoming once again able
 to go between these dimensions and our own,
 to reestablish the eschatological shamanism,
 lost scores of millennia ago.
 At one point, I picked up a stick
 and in the sandy lateritic soil of our living area,
 I scratched the shorthand symbol for and,
 I called it the ampersand,
 and for me, it's binding fold
 in one corner of a quaternary structure
 was very satisfying.
 I began to imagine this symbol
 as the symbol of the hyperdimensional condensation
 come UFO.
 I spoke of it as the ampersand for several days.
 Then I called it the eschatron.
 This I imagined as a basic unit of time.
 The combination and resonance
 among the set of eschatons in the universe
 determined which of the possible worlds allowed by physics
 would actually undergo the formality of occurring.
 I also imagined that at the intuitively given end of time,
 all the eschatons would resonate together as a unity
 and thereby create an ontological transformation of reality.
 It was at this time
 that I had the first faint stirrings of thoughts
 that were to lead eventually
 to the quantified wave hierarchy of time
 that is so thoroughly discussed in the invisible landscape.
 These early intuitions bore no resemblance
 to the final theory, good that they did not,
 for at that time I would have been completely unable
 to understand the theory that I was finally to propound.
 It took years of reading and self-education
 to keep track of the things
 that the internal voice was saying.
 It had a holistic and system-oriented way
 of approaching things
 that did seem to be slightly of another order,
 not enough to be alarming,
 but enough to again and again remind me
 that the ideas I was producing
 were coming fully organized from somewhere else,
 and I was nothing more than a message decipherer,
 hard-pressed to keep up with a difficult incoming code.
 Occasionally, I would seem to catch the mechanics
 of what was happening to us in action,
 and from such experiences,
 I concluded that whatever it was that was happening,
 part of it involved all the information
 that we had ever accumulated,
 down to the most trivial details,
 so that it seemed that something,
 something with overtones of being from outer space
 or from another dimension,
 was contacting us and doing it through the peculiar means
 of using every thought in our heads
 to lead us into telepathically-induced scenarios
 of extravagant imagining
 or deep theoretical understanding of things
 or in-depth scanning of strange times, places, and worlds.
 The source of this unearthly contact
 was the Stropharia Cubensis and our experiment.
 Our collective intelligence was not compromised,
 but what was compromised was the ability to reason,
 to give a coherent account of what was going on
 as paradox, coincidence,
 and general synchronistic strangeness
 began to asymptotically increase,
 and into the vacuum left by the collapse of reason
 rushed a staggering array of exotic intuitions
 about why things were as they were.
 (gentle music)
 (upbeat music)
 (upbeat music)
 (upbeat music)
 (upbeat music)
 (upbeat music)
 (upbeat music)
 (upbeat music)
 On the morning of the third day following the experiment,
 shortly after breakfast, Dennis announced a new teaching.
 This was that one could see any point in time
 by closing one's eyes, visualizing an eight,
 turning it on its side
 so as to approximate the sign for infinity,
 then mentally sliding the two closed rings
 over each other to form a circle,
 then shrinking the circle to a dot
 and thinking the word please
 and the target point in space time.
 Usually I knew not whence these images came to him.
 However, this time I was amazed
 for I recalled with perfect clarity
 that six weeks before,
 shortly before I left Vancouver, British Columbia,
 where I was then living,
 I had gone to a dentist
 as part of the standard pre-travel tune-up.
 While in the waiting room,
 I had read a several months old journal
 of some Canadian education association.
 In that journal, which I had not discussed with anyone,
 was an article very short
 about teaching machines and very young children.
 The picture this scenario with which the article opened,
 it may have even been called picture this,
 was of a child looking at a figure eight
 on a television screen,
 rolling it on its side,
 squeezing it together, et cetera.
 It was a bit of media flotsam
 that my brother or something working through my brother
 was able to lift right out of my mind
 weeks after I had forgotten it.
 Something able to refashion and use the image
 in whatever absurd way that it wished.
 (gentle music)
 (gentle music)
 (upbeat music)


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.68 sec
Decoding  : 1.77 sec
Transcribe: 1389.28 sec
Total Time: 1391.73 sec