[Music]
 Chapter 14, Looking Backward.
 Two months after all of these experiences, around mid-May of 1971,
 I was moved to try to sum up the particularly bizarre and possibly physics-compromising incidents that I could then recall.
 Here is what I wrote at that time, a time when I was concerned to refute the idea that schizophrenia was a magic word explaining all that we had undergone.
 I have almost two months' perspective on the events surrounding our experiments at La Charrera,
 and though I can clearly recognize that both myself and my brother evinced the classic symptomatology associated with the two generally distinguished categories of process schizophrenia,
 I am unable to make the assumption that our experiment was therefore nothing but two simultaneously occurring instances of schizophrenia.
 Rather, and with the full knowledge that such a position argues that I may still be experiencing residual symptoms of the illness,
 I maintain that we were in fact dealing with an objective phenomenon that, though of a highly peculiar nature, inexorably bound up with psychic processes,
 does have its basis in the molecular ideas we were in the process of investigating.
 As empirical evidence of this viewpoint, I mention the following points which seem to me to set our experiment outside the realm of mental illness.
 The suddenness with which the symptoms developed following our actual experiment.
 Within a few minutes after we completed our pre-planned experimental procedures,
 my brother began to disengage himself from the continuum of shared perceptions,
 and at this same time, I underwent a willing suspension of disbelief
 and began to experience the cybernetic unit that we had predicted would be a part of the effect we would cause
 if we were successful in our attempt to generate a superconducting genetic matrix-harmine bond.
 The integrated or dovetail aspect of our shared disassociation,
 meaning that, though both of us were experiencing the symptoms of types of schizophrenia,
 the fantasy, the ideas, and the understanding which we were experiencing were shared,
 so that while my brother thought of me as the shaman messiah in all manifestations,
 I perceived him as the condensed mind lens making a return journey across the universe
 that might have been one logical outcome of our experiment.
 Each of us alone would have given the clear appearance of being deluded.
 However, each of us seemed to offer elusive proof of the correctness of the position of the other.
 I might add that though no one else could understand my brother's peculiar mental processes,
 I believed I could discern depth and an integrated understanding which seemed to be behind them.
 But at the same time, I understood that his apparent lack of integration
 was due to the fact that his thinking was moving backward in some fundamental way.
 In the same way that a film running in reverse seems to present a spectacle of wild and irrational confusion,
 yet manages in the end to have things in their proper places,
 my brother's ideas and physical movements seemed to me to be simply the exact reverse of logical expectations.
 Knowing that the brain seems to operate on the principle of a hologram,
 Dennis had speculated before our experiment that he might receive a reverse image of my brain-mind organization
 for a brief time during the experiment.
 In listening to his free associations after the reversal, I became certain that this had in fact occurred,
 but for a much longer time than we had anticipated.
 In fact, I still believe that our only error throughout this entire experiment and the events following it
 has been our inability to correctly predict the duration of the process.
 I believe that our understanding of the mechanisms of the process, aside from its duration,
 have been correct, though still incomplete.
 Time is still, in other words, the crux of this matter.
 At times, my brother's free associations consisted of incidents which I had experienced more than a year previously,
 and more than 10,000 miles from where Dennis was then living, incidents about which I had spoken to no one.
 [Distorted, echoing sounds]
 Dennis seemed to possess the ability to hear my mind working during the time after the experiment.
 I illustrate by recalling an incident when I was sitting outside of our jungle hut,
 listening to his free associations, having noticed a few minutes before that his muscles were almost rigid
 with the enormous physical energy associated with some types of schizophrenia.
 I worried that he might at some future time resist my efforts to keep him from wandering away
 on his archetypal errands which constantly motivated him to try to leave our immediate living area.
 It occurred to me that with such strength he could easily injure me or perhaps escape.
 While mulling this disturbing possibility for the first time,
 I noticed that Dennis had left his hammock and was standing in the doorway of the hut.
 In a perfect imitation of our father's voice, he consoled me with the spoken thought that
 "Dennis is a good lad and would never do a thing like that."
 Another incident occurred seven days after the reversal began.
 Dennis announced that at eleven o'clock that night the good shit would appear.
 This was a reference to a kind of psilocybin-enriched hashish
 that Dennis claimed he had encountered a few months before leaving the States.
 This prediction of a material transmutation is not so odd when the alchemical concerns and ideas
 which led us into this experiment are recalled.
 After this conversation, Ev and I returned to the forest house for the night
 and Dennis stayed at the river house.
 As was our custom, we smoked a bit of the local marijuana before turning in.
 During this process, a small fragment fell, still burning from the pipe,
 and as I picked it up to return it to the pipe,
 the characteristic odor of Asian hashish was very noticeable.
 I examined the pipe very carefully,
 and though no change in the physical appearance of the smoking mixture had occurred,
 it was now definitely, to my own satisfaction and that of skeptical Ev,
 behaving exactly like hashish, a drug absolutely unknown in the Amazon in 1971.
 This phenomenon persisted for about five minutes and then slowly faded,
 leaving us to the rational continuum of normal behavior of materials.
 It is to be regretted that this transmutation occurred with a substance
 where any skeptic will be at ease in venting his scorn.
 We are all familiar with the facile view that potheads can't think straight,
 but to anyone with in-depth involvement with these two substances,
 the difference is unmistakable.
 This experience contained a number of parallels to the Nijuli movement
 among the Luangan people of Borneo,
 who in the early 1920s promulgated ideas centering around the claim
 that a piece of resin had suddenly become longer
 through the influence of a flute played nearby,
 and that the lengthening of the resin foreshadowed human immortality.
 Equally absurd and equally inexplicable
 was an incident that occurred on the morning of the fifth day.
 Dennis was sitting raving to no one in particular
 with a normal camp life going on around him.
 I was sitting near the cooking fire, sharpening the expedition's buck knife.
 I listened while Dennis raved, scanning his ramblings for a hint of a message.
 Suddenly I stopped my work.
 "Are you my tailor?"
 This in a strong English accent.
 That seemed familiar to me from somewhere.
 "All these reflections, see? It's me.
 But where is my tailor, my silly?
 Look, look at you. Why, you've got my knickers on!"
 [laughs]
 I blushed deeply.
 I looked at the ground and said nothing.
 I felt very boxed in.
 Dennis was imitating the conversation I had had with my little English friend
 after I had come looking for her,
 and returned with her delirious to my room in Nepal more than a year before.
 The crazy conversation between she and I that I had never discussed with anyone save her
 was now booming out over our Amazon clearing in the mad voice of my brother.
 It was hardly the sort of situation in which I wanted to exalt his prowess as a telepath.
 I said nothing and waited squirming for his raving to drift off into incoherence,
 but I was impressed and convinced that he had somehow been able to completely penetrate
 not only my thought but my nearly self-forgotten private memories.
 Most important among the features arguing more than a simple case of simultaneous schizophrenia
 is the idea model we have created out of the careful observation of things which happen to us.
 No one can argue that our theory of the hyperspatial nature of hallucinogenic drug states
 and the experiment we devised to test that theory yielded not only spectacular results
 but a wave particle theory of the nature of time.
 We took that theory and were able to construe it using the energy maps of the I Ching
 into a demonstrable idea that within its own terms explicates the nature of time and space.
 We turned an intuition into an idea model which explains the interconnection of physical and psychological phenomena
 from the submolecular level to the macrocosmic.
 Was this simply a creative outburst or was it part of a close encounter with the UFO enigma?
 After the first mushroom experience at La Charrera, we were involved with two ideas in particular.
 These were the motif of the teacher and the insect motif.
 Dennis and I could feel the overwhelming presence of some unseen intelligent entity
 which seemed to be observing and sometimes exerting influence in the situation
 to keep us moving gently toward a breakthrough.
 Because of the bizarre nature of the DMT flash,
 with its seeming stress upon themes alien, insectile and interstellar,
 we were led to speculate that the nature of the teacher was somehow that of a diplomat anthropologist
 come to give us the keys to galactarian citizenship.
 We discussed this entity in terms of a giant insect
 and through the insect's trill of the Amazon jungle at midday
 we seemed to be able to discern a deeper harmonic buzz
 that was the signal keying us to the entity in hyperspace.
 This sense of the presence of an alien third party was sometimes very intense,
 most intense from March 5th to 10th, and from there fading off gradually.
 This image of the insect teacher gave rise to numerous entomological speculations.
 We thought at the time that the process we were involved with
 was something like the process of giving birth to a child,
 but also much like the metamorphosis that occurs in the life cycle of insects,
 especially Coleoptera and Lepidoptera.
 We knew that tryptamine was somehow a major part of the solution
 to the enzymal mysteries surrounding metamorphosis.
 Recalling certain unconfirmed reports of the grub of a Coleoptera species
 of eastern Brazil eaten by Indians there for the hallucinatory effect.
 Noting that diffraction of the spectrum of visible light
 as it occurs in natural phenomena such as rainbows, peacock feathers,
 certain insects, and the colors that appear on the surfaces of some metals during heating
 are all persistent motifs within the stages of the alchemical opus.
 In fact, the cow de Pavones, the peacock's tail,
 is the brief stage which heralds the final whitening.
 By exotic intuition I knew that the occurrence of such interphase colors in nature
 indicated the presence of tryptamine-related compounds.
 Going further, I knew that the Lepidopterus New World genus Morpholia,
 which is characterized by a large wing area usually entirely expressed
 in brilliant blue interphase coloration,
 would be an ideal group upon which to conduct research to illuminate this unstudied field.
 I knew that the enzymal process in insect metamorphosis
 received molecular tuning and control through resonation
 induced by the harmonic strum of forest insects that have neuroactive tryptamine in their bodies,
 acting for them as an antenna to the electron spin resonance signal of the collective DNA,
 just as it did for us in the experiment.
 This signal would, I thought, keep the entire class insecta
 keyed in to the point of maximum symmetry in the evolutionary stream,
 thus explaining the remarkable durability of the insect adaptation
 which stabilized its basic evolutionary strategy some hundreds of millions of years ago,
 such things I was told quite conversationally by the voice in my mind.
 During this time, the iridescent black sheen which resulted when Stropharia cubensis grew in clumps
 and larger mushrooms shed spores on the caps of smaller mushrooms
 particularly caught my eye.
 Interestingly enough, this same metallic blue-black sheen
 was very noticeably present on the carapace of a large and shrill beetle,
 a member of the genus Buprestidae that I captured in the forest in the heat of the afternoon.
 It is known that the chitinous material which forms the outer covering of insects and spores
 is one of the most electron-dense materials in organic nature,
 being in this property similar to metals.
 My inner teacher urged that this specimen be analyzed for the presence of psychoactive tryptamines.
 If they were found, it would tend to confirm that the species responsible for the buzz of the forest,
 the Coleoptera and the cicadas,
 will in some species be found to contain the tryptamine compound necessary to allow them to key in on harmine
 present in local Banisteriopsis lianas and through them to the collective DNA network.
 I suppose that if a few of these species resonate,
 then other shrilling species could key themselves to the molecular signal,
 thus amplifying it and sustaining it through the forest for some hours of every day.
 Some of the life processes of the insecta, I felt sure, must be regulated through a few species in this way.
 These unlikely and bizarre ideas unfolded themselves over those long, hot days
 while Dennis lay confined to his hammock and I squatted on the earth nearby.
 By the third or fourth day, I had learned enough of the new and peculiarly symbolic language that he was speaking
 that I was more and more convinced that through it I could observe him making a gradual but progressive integration.
 Often then, long silences would fall between the raves
 and we would each drift off into a world of private reveries.
 Several times on such occasions I looked down and noticed with a weird thrill
 that my unconscious fingers had been engaged in gathering small twigs
 and arranging them in patterns as though they were to be miniature fires.
 This unconscious laying of small fires by my busy fingers seemed to me most extraordinary.
 It was interpreted then as a literal overflowing of the organizing energies that were being poured into me from some unknown source
 the same source that was supplying me with energy so that I could matter-of-factly eliminate the need for sleep.
 Occasionally Dennis would interrupt me to ask that I or Ev smoke a cigarette for him.
 Questioning uncovered his belief that in hyperspace the topology of all human bodies is continuous
 and so he could just absorb what he needed directly out of our bodies.
 For five days life went on in that mode with us sending amazingly few waves of interaction out into the real world around us.
 The morning of the 10th of March changed that.
 [birds chirping]
 I had hardly been away from the hut and the short stretch of trail that separated it from the edge of the pasture for five days.
 So after breakfast on that particularly flawless morning I chatted with Dennis and found him calmer and more lucid than he had been since the experiment.
 So composed and relaxed did he seem that I made the inevitable mistake of taking the situation for granted.
 I slipped away with Ev and the butterfly net for a relaxed stroll down the trail and deeper into the jungle.
 We were gone scarcely 40 minutes but returned to the hut and the clearing to find them humming with a deserted air of emptiness that was heart sinking.
 I was not afraid that Dennis would wander into the forest and become lost as I was convinced that whatever his state of mind it did not include that sort of thing.
 What I did fear was that he might focus others attention on us and the borderline areas that we were investigating.
 Leaving Ev at the camp I ran to the pasture and across it to the mission on the far side.
 As I ran I was busy telling myself that he would probably just have gone down to see Dave and Vanessa and that I would of course find him there.
 I was too preoccupied to notice that the bells of the mission, silent normally except on Sundays, had been pealing for some time.
 As I came over the rise that gave me a clear view of the river house and the lake below the choro I saw Vanessa leading Dennis toward the river house.
 I could sense that the situation was more difficult than I had hoped.
 Vanessa was angry and had seized the situation to drive home her point.
 It seemed that Dennis must have bolted from his hammock the moment that Ev and I passed out of sight.
 He had gone straight to the mission, located the bell rope of the bell used to call the people to mass,
 and had rung it furiously until the priest had found Vanessa and Dave and they had none too gently persisted him to desist.
 Nevertheless the already circulating rumor that one of our expedition had gone a bit off the deep end was not eroded by the sudden and totally public outrage.
 The delicate political balance I had established that had allowed me to have my way in the matter of treatment for Dennis was destroyed.
 Now Vanessa's idea that he should be moved to the river house was brought forth and endorsed by the priests
 and I was told by the police, riding on the inner assurance that worry is preposterous
 and seeing that I had completely lost control of the situation, I agreed to all suggestions.
 Vanessa had more news. An airplane was coming.
 It was not coming to take us out but it would enable us to begin our withdrawal
 since it would allow one of us to get a lift over a hundred kilometers of jungle to San Rafael
 where we had left the cache of equipment before making the overland march to La Charrera.
 This was the only opportunity to fly rather than walk back to those supplies
 and Vanessa pressed that we should take advantage of it.
 I agreed with everything.
 I assumed that soon the eruption of the millennium would obviate all such mundane concerns
 but that was a fact that I would leave others to discover for themselves
 as they made their way into the ever deepening dimension of the future.
 Dave had volunteered to go on the airplane.
 The decision was made almost at a moment's notice.
 He would reach our supplies and single-handedly undertake to have them and himself
 shipped up the Rio Putumayo and then back to Bogota.
 We would meet him back there when and if we got out by some means not yet clear.
 A bag was hastily packed. The airplane came skimming in and then it was gone again and we were four.
 Vanessa and Ev became Dennis' nurses.
 He was moved to the river house and I preferred to continue to live at the jungle house to avoid crowding.
 Dave was gone.
 The debate continued as to whether the direction in Dennis' raving was toward improvement
 or whether it was only progressive drifting in the world in which he had become lost.
 Dennis' move to the river was a turning point and from then hence
 the effects of the phenomenon unleashed were less in our minds and more in the world.
 Through it all we were still after the lens-shaped object.
 What the teacher told me in the first few days after the experiment was
 "You almost got it. You didn't quite get it."
 Or rather it used the metaphor of condensation.
 "It is condensing. It was like a perfect alchemical metaphor.
 The stone is everywhere. It is here."
 Dennis would say, "I can see it. It's 250 feet away to the left
 down near the water hole hovering above the water."
 Each day it would get closer in. There were freak lightning storms.
 Slowly I noticed that meteorological phenomena tended to concentrate in the southeast.
 I began to look there and whenever I did I would see rainbows.
 Intuitions concerning what was going on ranged from the religiously profound
 to the utterly absurd.
 On the afternoon of the 12th of March Dennis underwent a few hours
 when he was able to respond, however cryptically,
 to the questions we put to him concerning how things appeared to him.
 This all went on at the river house and it happened that living around that house
 was a handsome rooster and his mate.
 He was perhaps the very cock that I had heard crow at dawn
 on the day of the experiment and again two days thereafter.
 There was a perky alertness about this cock and hen that had received comment among us before.
 This particular afternoon Dennis called our attention to the little hen,
 saying that if one thought of her as art, then the achievement she represented was immense.
 Who could make such a hen?
 Only the one who could have fashioned the peculiar world that we had fallen into.
 And that one is... James Joyce.
 Over the next few minutes he proceeded to make his case
 that Finnegan's wake represented the most complete understanding
 of the relation of the human mind to the time and space around it
 and that therefore Joyce, at his death,
 had somehow been shouldered with the responsibilities of overseeing
 this part of God's universe.
 In this Dennis was only following Wyndham Lewis,
 who made Joyce's ascent to eminence in the afterworld the subject of his novel,
 The Human Age.
 Jim and Nora, as Dennis called the newly revealed deity and his consort,
 were in and through everything at Laucherer,
 particularly in the things that Joyce had loved.
 The little hen as the symbol of Annalivia Plouribel of the wake was one of these things.
 It was Joyce's humor that radiated outward from the path that he had followed.
 These ideas were absurd but delightful
 and they led me eventually to re-read Joyce
 and to accept him as one of the true pioneers in the mapping of hyperspace.
 They did not, however, shed much light on our predicament.
 From that view of life as literature, Dennis moved on.
 He reminded me that one of the alchemical analogs for the philosopher's stone
 that we shared in our private code of associations
 was a certain small silver key,
 a key to a box of inlaid wood with a secret compartment
 that had belonged to our maternal grandfather.
 I said that the ability to produce that key,
 which had been lost since our childhood,
 would prove the reality of Dennis's shamanic powers
 and their ability to materially transcend normal space and time.
 The conversation took the form of a question-and-answer session
 that ended with Dennis demanding that I hold out my hand
 and then slapping his closed hand into my open one,
 letting out a loud, ludicrous squawk
 and depositing in my palm a small silver key.
 Then would you be convinced?
 Well, look at this!
 At the time, I was thunderstruck.
 We were hundreds of miles from anywhere.
 The key before me was indistinguishable from the key of my childhood memories.
 Had he saved that key over all those years to produce it now
 in the middle of the Amazon to completely distort my notion of reality?
 Or was this only a similar key that Dennis had been carrying
 when he arrived in South America,
 but that I had somehow not noticed until he produced it?
 This seemed unlikely.
 He was confined to a room far from our stored equipment
 and it was difficult to conceive of him becoming calm and organized enough
 to go to the baggage and carefully sort through it to the secreted key.
 This matter of the silver key,
 whether it was the original key or where it had come from,
 has never been satisfactorily settled.
 The original box was lost long ago,
 so the key was never tested.
 A final ironic note is added to the story
 by the fact that both Dennis and I were fans of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft
 and so were aware of his story,
 "Through the Gates of the Silver Key,"
 a tale seething with many dimensions, strange beings, and a cosmic timescale.
 After Dennis had moved to reside in the River House,
 there was no longer any need for my sleepless watch at night.
 But the lack of a need to sleep prevailed.
 I actually looked forward each day to the time when everyone would retire
 and I would have before me long hours of delicious, silent thought.
 Like the fox spirit of the I Ching who wanders eternally among the jeweled night grasses,
 I wandered in the pastures and on the trails around La Charrera.
 Sometimes I would sit beneath the Amma-initialed tree for hours,
 watching vast mandalas of space and time turn and glisten around me.
 At times I would walk, long strides, nearly loping,
 head thrown back, gazing at the every-colored stars.
 Effortlessly, the deeper something that shared my mind
 connected up the constellations for me
 and showed me the enormous zodiacal machine
 that must have come to the ancients with the same suggestive force.
 Understanding, understanding in the form of immersion in millions of images of mankind,
 in all times and places,
 struggling with the insoluble enigma of being and human destiny.
 It was during those velvet, star-strewn jungle nights
 that I felt closest to understanding the tripartite mystery
 of the philosopher's stone, the UFO, and the human soul.
 There is something human that transcends the individual
 and that transcends life and death as well.
 It has will, motive, and enormous power.
 Under certain conditions, the manipulative power of consciousness
 moves beyond the body and into the world.
 The world then obeys the will of consciousness
 to the degree that the inertia of pre-existing physical laws can be overcome.
 This inertia is overcome by consciousness
 determining the outcome of the normally random micro-physical events.
 Over time, the deflection of micro-physical events from randomness is cumulative,
 so that eventually the effects of such deflections
 are to shift the course of events in larger physical systems as well.
 Therefore, the greater the amount of time consciousness has
 in which to make its effects felt,
 the greater the possibility becomes that the willed end will come to pass,
 as subtle pressure toward a given end
 accomplishes the series of micro-deviations
 eventuating in a non-random and anti-entropic situation,
 the secret, in short, of falling in love.
 Consciousness works the same way within the brain,
 but there matter and energy are in a more unbound and dynamic state
 than throughout the rest of nature.
 It is easy for consciousness to direct the electrical flow in the central nervous system,
 though we have no idea how this is done.
 It is less easy for it to move, not electrons,
 but whole atomic systems spread far and wide in time and space.
 This may explain why it is easier to form a thought,
 but having one's wishes come true takes longer.
 There is an interface between consciousness active in the world
 and consciousness active in the CNS and through the intermediary of the body.
 That interface is language.
 In using language, consciousness informs the brain
 to inform the body and to inform the brain.
 The brain is the interface between consciousness active in the world
 and the intermediary of the body.
 In using language, consciousness informs the brain
 to inform the body, to impart to the random motion of the air molecules
 near but outside the body a coherency.
 This coherency is supplied by consciousness in the form of a word.
 None of the physical laws operating on the air molecules have been violated
 is due to an input of energy, an input of energy
 whose release was initiated by an act of conscious will.
 Language is thereby seen to be a kind of parapsychological ability,
 since it involves action at a distance and telekinesis,
 albeit voice transduced.
 Perhaps under the influence of psilocybin, an immense energizing of will
 could be vocally transduced into the world
 and do more than imprint a signal onto the random motion of air molecules.
 Perhaps instead a sign, visibly beheld,
 might be transduced and appear
 through appropriate shifts of refraction in those same nearby air molecules.
 Normal speech itself is sometimes seen to affect the refractive index of the air
 in front of the speaker's mouth.
 Perhaps this is an indication of the hidden potential of speech
 to go beyond its normal function of symbolizing reality
 to actually signifying it.
 A more perfect logos would seem to be the result,
 a logos able to regulate the activity of the ego
 as it exists in the sum total of the individuals living at any time.
 It is like a god. It is the human god.
 It is something that will happen to human destiny sometime in the future.
 And, because it will happen, it is happening.
 Nothing is unannounced,
 and the ontological mode of the higher dimensions
 into which humanity is being propelled
 is being anticipated by the singularity which we call the UFO.
 Valet is correct.
 The UFO is teaching something through its reinforcement schedule.
 It is preparing us to confront the god facet of ourselves
 that our explorations into the nature of life and matter are about to reveal.
 [singing]
 (speaking in a foreign language)


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