[More gibberish]
 Chapter 15. Saucer Full of Secrets.
 The 11th of March was the full moon.
 It passed uneventfully enough, meaning that I can now recollect little of what happened.
 I remained ecstatic, certain that all was for the best,
 certain that some definitive tipping of the hand by the thing we were dealing with was about to occur.
 The next day, in the late afternoon, Ev walked out to see me from the Riverside house.
 She invited me to return with her to the river, for all of us to have dinner there together.
 She showed the strain of what we had all been going through.
 There was no doubt that whatever had happened to us,
 it was pushing all of us to the limits of what we could assimilate without wanting to resist it.
 As we walked back across the pasture, the atmosphere seemed to be even more alive and active
 with spawning clouds and drifting mist than usual.
 Ev pointed to the southeast where a black stratocumulus mass was seething and boiling up to great altitudes.
 We watched for a few moments and it became like a vast mushroom cloud,
 the aftermath of a thermonuclear blast.
 The impression was very startling, and Ev recalled to me Dennis' words with regard to the mushroom.
 He said that it was the mushroom at the end of history,
 that the shape of the atomic cloud was a pun in physics and biophysics
 on the transformative powers of the strophariad and its eruption into human history.
 As we watched, suddenly Ev gasped, for from the seeming base of the cloud
 emerged what looked like a column of light.
 It was sustained and was not a bolt of lightning.
 It was hard to see how it could be a shaft of sunlight since it was late afternoon,
 the sun in the west, and this was all taking place in the southeast.
 We watched it for perhaps a minute and then it stopped abruptly.
 Ev was quite shaken.
 It was of an empirical order different than anything she had experienced at La Charrera up to that time.
 Arriving at the Riverside campfire, we learned that Vanessa had been up at the mission to the radio,
 to the bush pilot who had whisked Dave from our midst.
 The pilot was willing to follow Vanessa's intent and think of us as a low-grade emergency
 and would return in a few days to fly us out.
 I was unhappy with these arrangements, but there was nothing that I could do,
 for I knew that we, the gringo strangers, would lose face with the local people
 when our need for this airlift became known.
 Also, I had not the faith of Vanessa that all Dennis needed to return him to normal
 was to check him into the world of modern psychiatry with its hair-brained reductionism and chemotherapy.
 But there was nothing to be done for it, and so we dined in silence, each lost in thoughts unshared.
 The evening's only moment of humor was provided by Ev's animated description of Dennis
 evading Vanessa's wardenship and slipping away from the Riverside house sometime during the previous night
 and going to sit quietly in the house of some Colombian colonistas
 who awoke to find him there as unassuming as a piece of furniture.
 The story died away and the unspoken dimension of it all returned to move in the minds of each of us.
 The next day we would pack all our equipment and move it to the river
 in preparation for a flight that could come at any time and would certainly not come announced.
 Already we were preparing to withdraw from the vortex at La Charrera.
 The next day was the 13th.
 The camp in the forest, the hallowed-seeming spot where the transforming experiment had occurred, was dismantled.
 All the artifacts that set it apart from dozens of other Witoto huts were tucked away and it was returned to its folk anonymity.
 Outside in a pile we left quite a cargo trove behind us
 for the forced evacuation by airplane of the four of us plus the pilot left precious little room for any gear.
 Some insect and plant specimens would leave with us, the cameras,
 the notebooks on the experiment. That was to be it.
 The things that we left were quickly assimilated by the tolerant Witoto owners of the site of our attempt to probe hyperspace.
 We were all installed in the river house ready to go with the airplane whenever it should appear.
 Everything seemed to be moving forward of its own accord.
 We swam in the river and sat on the rocks, scanning the sky and listening for the drone of the little amphibian.
 Thus the afternoon passed, with even Dennis quiet after an episode in the early morning
 in which he had methodically thrown the contents of his room out the window
 to the point of ripping out the window frame and hurling it after everything else.
 Around four o'clock I was lying on the river bank about twenty feet back from the river's edge.
 I was thinking about a walk to the river two days before
 when each step nearer the water seemed to bring more rhyme and rhythm into my thoughts.
 From nowhere I seemed to remember an old Celtic saying that Robert Graves discusses
 which says that poetry is made at the edge of running water.
 It had something to do with that, I believed, and I was pondering it.
 Vanessa and Ev were in front of me at the water's edge, washing.
 Directly across the river from us lay the southeasterly direction
 in which Ev and I had seen the cloud with shaft of light just twenty-four hours earlier.
 I was gazing in that direction when I noticed what I thought was the weak beginning of a rainbow.
 Just a place low in the sky near the horizon where there seemed to be the faint touch of a spectrum.
 After a few seconds I called down to the two women and asked if they saw a rainbow across the river.
 They glanced across the river for only a moment and both said that they saw nothing.
 I did not persist, but instead I watched the sky in that spot.
 By this time I had stopped forcing my opinions on people because I was regarded as nuts.
 Not incoherent, but that I couldn't be trusted or couldn't be relied on because I believed such odd things.
 That was my flaw, to believe odd things.
 I kept watching across the river and I saw the thing intensify.
 I was extraordinarily interested in all that was going on.
 In this pastoral setting it seemed to me that a great revelation was brewing.
 I watched and I saw the colors deepen.
 The bow of a rainbow never formed, but the deepening of the colors in one spot was very definite.
 Again I inquired of the women if they saw the rainbow across the river.
 Again the light glanced and... wonderful!
 Yes, we see it. Not much of one, is it?
 The clue-scanning part of my hyperactive imagination was upon this detail in an instant.
 Yes, first a cloud with a shaft of light, now a spot of spectrogrammatic color, steady in the same place in the sky.
 I had very strongly then a sense of the eye in the sky drawing close to my thought and watching with satisfaction as I understood.
 Understood the importance of the southeast, of watching, of focusing my attention on that spot.
 And in my mind the teacher said, "This is the place. This is the sign. Watch here."
 I said nothing to anyone, but I formed the resolve to spend that sleepless night, not as I had spent the others,
 wandering the fields like the fox spirit or meditating at the choro.
 Rather I would sit here, where the lake empties and the Agaraparana resumes its languid course.
 Here, at the boat landing, seventy feet down a steep mud bank from the riverside house, sit through the night and watch.
 All night long I sat, reviewing the things that had passed,
 seeming to divide my consciousness and send it both backward through my family tree, but also forward into the future.
 I seemed to see all the years still ahead, some technique to emerge from this contact,
 careers pursued across space and time, and finally vindication as the world realized the truth of the transdimensional nature of the stropharia visions
 and the true nearness of the worlds that they throw open.
 It had become my belief that the contact with an intelligent and utterly alien species was beginning for humanity,
 that out of the long night of cosmic time the novelty of novelty,
 the moment of contact between minds on utterly different planes, was beginning.
 We were among the first. We had gone to the Amazon to explore the dimensions glimpsed in tryptamine ecstasy,
 and there, in the darkness of the heart of the Amazon, we had been found and touched by this bizarre and ancient life form
 that was now awakening to the global potential of a symbiotic relationship with technical humanity.
 All night long strange vistas and insights poured through me.
 I saw gigantic machineries and worlds of vegetable and mechanical forms on scales inconceivably vast.
 Time, agitized and glittering, seemed to pour by me like living superfluids inhabiting dream regions of terrible pressure and super cold.
 It was an ecstasy, an end stasis that lasted hours and placed the seal on all of my previous existence.
 At the end I was reborn, but as what I knew not.
 In the gray of a false dawn the wave of internal imagery faded away.
 I rose from where I had been sitting for hours and stretched.
 The sky was clear, but it was still very early, and stars were still dimly to be seen in the west.
 In the southeast, the direction toward which my attention had been focused, the sky was clear,
 except for a line of fog or ground mist lying parallel to the horizon,
 only a few feet above the treetops on the other side of the river and perhaps half a mile away.
 In other words, a line of light fog back from the river and slightly above the treetops in the middle distance.
 As I stretched and stood upon the flat stone where I had sat, I noticed that the line of fog seemed to have grown darker.
 It also seemed to be rolling in place or churning.
 I watched very carefully.
 The rolling line of darkening mist split in two parts, and each of these smaller clouds also divided apart.
 Now, after only a moment or two to execute the changes,
 I was looking at four lens-shaped clouds of the same size lying in a row slightly above the horizon and only half a mile or so away.
 A wave of excitement swept through me, and then a wave of definite fear.
 I was glued to the spot, unable to move as in a dream.
 As I watched, the clouds re-coalesced over the next two minutes or so in the same way that they had divided apart.
 The symmetry of this dividing and rejoining, and the fact that the smaller clouds were all the same size,
 lent the performance an eerie air, as if nature herself were suddenly to become the tool of some unseen organizing agency.
 As the clouds re-coalesced, they seemed to grow even more dark and opaque.
 As they all became one, that cloud seemed suddenly to begin to swirl inward like a tornado or a water spout.
 It flashed into my mind that perhaps it was a water spout, something I have never seen.
 But even as the thought formed, I heard a high-pitched, undulating whine come drifting over the jungle treetops,
 obviously from the direction of the thing I was watching.
 I turned to give one glance at the riverside house seventy feet behind me up the steep hill.
 I was gauging whether I had time to run and awaken someone to get confirmation of what was happening.
 To arouse someone, I would have had to go hand over hand up the slope and consequently take my eyes off the thing I was watching.
 In the space of an instant, I decided that I could not cease observing.
 I tried a shout, but no sound came from my throat because I was afraid.
 The siren sound was rapidly gaining pitch. In fact, everything seemed to be becoming very much speeded up.
 The moving cloud was definitely growing larger, rapidly, moving straight toward the place where I was.
 I felt my legs turn to water and sat down, shaking terribly.
 For the first time, I believed all that had happened to us, and I knew that the thing was now about to take me.
 Details seemed to be solidifying as it approached me.
 It passed directly over my head at about two hundred feet altitude,
 banked steeply upward and was lost from sight by the edge of the slope behind me.
 In the last moment before it was lost, I completely threw open my senses to it, and I saw it very clearly.
 It was a machine with unobtrusive soft blue and orange lights.
 It was saucer-shaped, rotating slowly, and as it passed over me, I could see symmetrical indentations on the underside.
 It was making the "whee, whee, whee" sound of science fiction fans.
 My emotions were all in a jumble. First I was terrified, but at the moment I knew that it was not going to stop, I felt disappointment.
 I was amazed, and I was trying to remember what I had seen as clearly as possible.
 Was it real in the naive sense in which the question is asked of UFOs and tables and chairs?
 No one else saw this thing, as far as I know. I alone was its observer.
 I believe that had there been other observers, they would have seen essentially what I have reported.
 But as for real, who can say?
 I saw this thing go from being a bit of cloud to being a rivet-studded aircraft of some kind.
 Was it more true to itself as cloud or aircraft? Was it a hallucination?
 Against my testimony can be put my admitted lack of sleep and our involvement with psychedelic drugs.
 Curiously, this last point can be interpreted in my favor.
 I am familiar through direct experience with every known class of hallucinogen.
 What I saw that morning did not fall into any of the categories of hallucinated imagery that I am familiar with.
 Also against my testimony is the inevitable, incongruous detail that seems to render the entire incident absurd.
 It is that as the saucer passed overhead, I saw it clearly enough to judge it to be identical with the UFO
 with three half-spheres on its underside that appears in an infamous UFO photo made by George Adamski
 and widely assumed to be a hoax.
 I had not closely followed the matter, but accepted the expert opinion that what Adamski had photographed
 was a rigged-up endcap of a Hoover vacuum cleaner.
 But I saw this same object in the sky above La Charrera.
 Was it in fact picked up as a boyhood UFO enthusiast,
 something as easily picked out of my mind as other memories seem to have been?
 My stereotyped but already debunked notion of a UFO suddenly appears in the sky.
 By appearing in a form that casts doubt on what it appears to be,
 it achieves a more complete cognitive dissonance than if its seeming alienness were completely convincing.
 It was, if you ask me, and there is no one else really that one can ask,
 either a holographic image of a technical perfection impossible on Earth today,
 or it was the manifestation of something which in that instance chose to begin as mist and end as machine,
 but which could have appeared in any form a manifestation of a humorous something's omniscient control
 over the world of form and matter.
 It was not a mirage of the conventional sort.
 Years later it occurs to me that perhaps it was a kind of mirage still unknown to us, a temporal mirage.
 The ordinary mirage is an inverted image of water or a distant place.
 The cause is the distortion of light by alternate levels of hot and cold air.
 At Benares in India I saw a triple image of the city suspended over the surface of the Ganges.
 But a temporal mirage is another matter.
 It is a lenticular image of a distant time and place, cause unknown.
 What makes the ordinary and temporal mirages members of the same class
 is that both types of mirages require the intercession of the human mind in order to exist.
 Certain areas of the world have local conditions which make them mirage-prone.
 Might the same be true of temporal mirages?
 Or perhaps the temporal mirage is a natural phenomenon,
 and the UFO is an artifact resulting from the temporal mirage being used or experimented with by some future technology.
 I believe that this latter may come close to the mark and that this is what the UFO mystery is partially about.
 The UFO is a reflection of a future event that promises man's eventual mastery over time, space and matter.
 The fact that we, in our clumsy attempt to probe these mysteries, were able to coax nature
 into throwing out this great burning scintilla of pure contradiction
 from the dark retort where she labors over the chemistry of the millennium is full of import.
 It meant to me that we were on the right track.
 The Stropharia cubensis mushroom is a memory bank of galactic history,
 alien but full of promise.
 It throws open a potential for understanding that will sweep away the petty concerns of Earth and history-bound humanity.
 At La Charrera, I had only the isolated personal conviction that our approach would be vindicated.
 Now, as our ideas are finding a small community that shares these intuitions,
 I am yet more sure that the answer to all of the mysteries we pose to disequilibrate our view of the world
 are to be understood by looking within ourselves.
 When we look within ourselves with psilocybin,
 we discover that man does not have to look outward toward the futile promise of the life that may circle distant stars
 in order to still our cosmic loneliness.
 We should look within.
 The paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.
 The UFO encounter marked for me the culmination of our work at La Charrera.
 My contact with the saucer took place at dawn on the 14th of March.
 The following day at 11 a.m., the airplane arrived unannounced but not unexpected.
 Vanessa had been anticipating it for three days.
 It was a matter of a few moments to clamber aboard after saying farewell to the priests and the police,
 all of whom had been most patient with our colorful party and its unusual preoccupations.
 Only in visions had my eyes recently rested on stuff such as the little airplane was made of,
 the highly polished acrylic surfaces of machines and things impervious to hard ultraviolet radiation,
 what the people of Amazonas call machete skin.
 It was a reminder of all that we were returning to.
 Dennis was on his best behavior, and beyond his commenting as we got aboard
 that an airplane was a partial condensation of a flying saucer,
 we said little. A roar of the engine, a hard pull back on the stick,
 and we and our legendary bush pilot were airborne.
 We circled the mission once before settling down to follow the Agaraparaná back to the Putumayo
 and the version of civilization that Laetitia would afford.
 What a tiny world La Charrera is, left behind in the trackless jungle
 after only a glimpse of buildings and Cebu cattle resting in the green pastures
 looking like lumps of melting vanilla ice cream.
 Whatever we had touched and been touched by, it was now falling behind us.
 We stayed two days in Laetitia, days in which Dennis showed marked improvement
 while the rest of us drifted into various stances of distance with regard to each other,
 almost an effort to compensate for the excessive intimacy our isolated expedition had made necessary.
 The oddest thing about Laetitia was that we were hardly off the plane
 before we ran into Jack and Ruby, an American couple who just happened to be renting
 Ev's apartment in Bogota for a few weeks.
 I had thought the name combination weird when I met them six weeks before.
 Now the fact that they were practically awaiting us in Laetitia heightened the strangeness.
 I could not quite wrap my mind around it.
 By the time we reached Bogota, Dennis was nearly completely returned to normal,
 lending weight to the idea that some sort of temporary chemical imbalance
 had been responsible for his reaction,
 rather than the emergence of a chronically unbalanced personality structure.
 He was very shaky and very bummed by any mention of fourth-dimensional superconducting bonds,
 Yahé, or shamanism.
 He said, "Look, I have had it."
 He had, too.
 He was nearly normal, but I was just at the beginning of a years-long period of unusual ideation,
 the state of suspended disbelief that gave birth to the ideas concerning time
 that are set out in the invisible landscape.
 On the 20th of March, there was general agreement that Dennis was totally back with us.
 It was an occasion of great happiness, and we celebrated at one of Bogota's finest restaurants.
 It was an immense accomplishment to have been able to allow the reversal to work itself out
 without the aggravating influence of modern mental health care procedures.
 The ordeal in the wilderness that all shamans must face had been endured,
 a step on the path to knowledge taken.
 On March 21st, I made a journal entry, the first in weeks,
 and the only one that I was able to make for several more months.
 I said this,
 "It is now 17 days since March 4th and the concretizing of the Ampersand.
 If I have more or less correctly understood this phenomenon,
 then tomorrow, the 18th day, will mark some sort of halfway point in this experience.
 I predict that tomorrow Dennis will return to the psychological set he experienced prior to March 1st,
 though it is possible that rather than a residual amnesia concerning events at La Charrera,
 he will have instead a growing understanding of the experiment of which he was the creator.
 The past weeks have been harrowing and seemingly made out of so many times, places, and minds
 that a rational chronicle has been impossible.
 Only Finnegan's Wake gives some idea of the reality of the paradoxicum as we experienced it
 by virtue of being able to pierce beyond time's double face.
 In spite of earlier misunderstandings and misprojections concerning the cycles of time
 and number operating within the phenomenon,
 I now believe that in these 17 days we have experienced,
 albeit sometimes running backwards and certainly enormously condensed,
 enough of a full cycle to begin to foresee in some dim sense the events of the next 20 or so days.
 By observing the sequence of events in the first 20 days
 and then using the knowledge that these events are in effect running backwards,
 we may reverse the order of the last 20 days
 and have some idea of the approximate nature and direction of the opus.
 This journal entry makes clear that while Dennis was recovering from his submergence in the Titanic struggle,
 I was quite in the grip of a struggle of my own.
 I was caught up in the construction of numerous charts
 which showed the kinds of themes that I was involved with early on
 in my search for a resolution of the experience via theory of time.
 In those early speculations, I was involved with a mythic cycle of 40 days' duration.
 It was only later, when I began to be impressed with the specifically biological nature of the temporal cycles,
 that I turned my attention to cycles of 64 days' duration,
 and it was that which led me eventually to turn to the I Ching.
 In those early ideas, there was not a hint of the eventual theory in its operational details,
 yet the intent is clearly the same.
 However, the conception was much cruder, more personal and idiosyncratic.
 Nearly the rest of that march was spent in Bogota, a dreary time,
 the urban dregs of a teeming modern city resting not lightly on our jungle-sensitive perceptions.
 Dennis seemed quite normal, though weakened and sobered by all that had gone on.
 There were no messages from Dave and Vanessa had returned to the States.
 On the 29th, Dennis followed her example and flew to Colorado.
 I insisted that Ev and I go to Southern Columbia so that I could simply have time to reflect.
 This we did. I reviewed the whole incident at La Charrera with no new insights
 and concluded that some sort of psychic gravity was pulling us home.
 On the 13th of April, one day short of a month after my encounter with the UFO, we re-arrived in Berkeley.
 It was a short and difficult visit. I was beginning to see the dim outlines of the I Ching wave theory,
 and the first maps of the I Ching hierarchy were done at that time.
 I kept myself away from people. I was totally immersed in my work.
 I had no interest or patience for anything else.
 I was in the grip of a creative mania more extreme than I had thought possible.
 Each conversation with someone, these matters seemed to open vast gulfs of misunderstanding.
 I saw clearly that I had to re-learn epistemology, genetics, philosophy of science,
 the entire gamut of subjects necessary to discuss the areas that I now had such compelling concern for.
 As the time charts advanced, the implied termination of normal time,
 the idea of concrescent psychomatter, and the UFO that I had encountered at La Charrera
 became identified with each other and with the eschatologies of certain religious traditions.
 The early, unquantified time charts seemed full of coincidence relative to my own personal life.
 In particular, the closed transition points in each section of the wave seemed to have special meaning for me.
 Positioning one of these points on the experiment at La Charrera seemed to make other points in the past,
 the death of my mother, and points in the future, my 24th birthday, especially important.
 The paradoxes, the contradiction and the absurdity of my most compelling interests in the eyes of other people
 made it necessary for me to work things out outside the sphere of consensual validation that my own society imposed.
 I understood that whether or not the effect that we were exploring was a general phenomenon in nature or an idiosyncrasy,
 it was obviously vitally important to me personally to let the forces that I had become entangled with play themselves out to the end.
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