[Music]
 Chapter 16, Return.
 On the 15th of July, Ev and I again stood on the edge of the Amazon interior.
 My intention to return to La Charrera was fast becoming fact.
 My journal begins again as we started down the Putumayo,
 a name that had by then come to suggest to me an etymology like "the whore of illusion."
 Having left the vicinity of Puerto Leguizamo a few hours ago with our cargo of beer and cattle,
 we are once again enclosed by and moving through the dream that is the forests and rivers of the Amazon basin.
 This return, to continue the contemplation of the phenomenon in the pure medium of tropical nature in which we discovered it,
 marks a dedication to and an immersion in the phenomenon that, I imagine,
 anyone familiar with the events which overtook us in March finds incredible,
 and even, perhaps, not without an element of risk.
 I refer not to danger inherent in the jungle or to the inevitable hardships attendant upon travel in remote areas,
 but rather, and obviously, to the psychological stress inherent in confronting the phenomenon,
 strangely so much a part of oneself and yet vast and other,
 away from the mitigating world of friends and a world that is unaware or skeptical
 concerning our encounter with the phenomenon and the subsequent understanding which we derived from it.
 My first consideration in this area is to do all in my ability to eliminate the unexpected.
 My brother's cryptoskizophrenic reversal is ever in my mind in this regard.
 I believe we are dealing with something to which no vagueness or uncertainty of inner dynamics adheres.
 Careful thought and study can eliminate the possibility of the contact phenomenon
 suddenly turning on us or otherwise behaving unexpectedly.
 The right approach to these things remains elusive.
 Again and again the inner voice of the phenomenon has insisted that,
 since my brother's opus of hypercarbulation, nothing at all remains to be done,
 and that if something is required in the way of activity,
 then by virtue of the very nature of the contact, that something will be exactly what we are doing.
 Ev and I lived quietly at La Charrera from August until November of 1971,
 and during that time I was able to completely indulge my submersion in the interior processes that I was experiencing.
 During the second residency at La Charrera, the theme of ukuhe recurred.
 We had made the acquaintance of several of the Witoto people who regularly walk the path near our own hut
 a few hundred yards down the same path from where the original experiment took place.
 Among those Witoto who stopped to exchange a word or watch me collecting insects was a sturdy older man named Demetrius.
 In my excited state of mind the letters D, M, and T seemed to stand out in his name like a beacon.
 As soon as I could get him alone, I haltingly put the question to him.
 "Ukuhe?" "Ukuhe?" He was barely able to believe his ears.
 That this strange weak creature, like something from another world,
 should directly inquire after a secret tradition of his people was incredible.
 I have no idea how many cultural conventions were overlooked,
 but after a bit more conversation, or what passes for conversation between people who share no common language,
 I was sure that he would try to help me.
 Days later, on my 24th birthday, I was brought a tarry goo wrapped in a little leaf packet.
 I was never able personally to obtain a hallucinogenic experience from this material,
 but later analysis by the chemists of the Karolinska Institute confirmed the presence of dimethyltryptamine.
 Dimetrius had been as good as his word.
 By the time that life at La Charrera had actually carried us through November 16th, 1971,
 the date that the chart and the accumulation of coincidences had generated seemed to indicate as the critical date,
 I had begun to realize that the chart had too many variables to ever function as a predictive map of the future.
 It would be necessary, I realized then, to somehow quantify the various parameters of the wave,
 so that judgments concerning it could be less subject to personal bias.
 The last piece of writing that I did at La Charrera was done on the morning of the 16th.
 It was a kind of fable.
 Two old friends, Arabians somehow, yet more ancient, sit in a palace far older than themselves,
 set on a mountainside surrounded by vineyards, date palms, and citrus orchards.
 Insomniac and affable, they pass the long starry hours preceding dawn in the smoking of hashish and the propounding of riddles.
 "Share my pleasure at this puzzle and its resolution," said the darker to the older,
 and he passed his hand across his companion's eyes.
 The older man then stood in the dream and watched the puzzle, a world of form and law,
 interlocking wheels and passion and intellect unfold.
 He passed into its species and empires, dynastic families and individual persons of genius,
 philosophers and catastrophes.
 He felt the texture and tone of all the being in the world his friend had created.
 He sought the secret pattern his friend, he knew, had surely hidden in his creation,
 for this was a game that they often played.
 Finally, in a great despotism, in an age of brash science and bright decadence,
 he saw himself divided into the persons of two brothers.
 Through time, through their wanderings and lifetimes which passed before him in a moment,
 he perceived the intricate and pleasing nature of the riddle.
 Understanding, he dissolved the mists and wheels of the dream fable with a laugh,
 a laugh they shared, and then once more they passed their pipe before strolling into the azure garden
 where dawn would find them among the peacocks beneath the palm grants and bending acacias.
 The important thing about the second trip to La Charrera was that the teaching was more or less continuous,
 and what it taught after months and months was an idea about time.
 It is an idea which is very concrete, it has mathematical rigor.
 The teacher showed me how to do something with the I Ching that perhaps no one had ever before known how to do.
 Perhaps the Chinese knew how to do it once and lost it thousands of years ago.
 It taught me a hyper-temporal way of seeing.
 The invisible landscape explained all this.
 It is not something that can be corralled within the confines of a conversation.
 It enables one to have as much of a certain kind of knowledge of the future as it is possible to know.
 The future is not absolutely determined.
 There is not, in other words, a future to see in which every event is determined.
 That isn't how the universe is put together.
 The future does not have that nature of already-completedness, but it is conditioned.
 What had originally gotten me looking at the I Ching was the odd way in which my early simplistic notion
 of 64-day cycles of some kind of set of influences worked very well in my own life
 surrounding the time of the experiment.
 My mother's death was the first of these points in time that I isolated.
 Then I noted that my transformed relationship with Ev had begun 64 days after that,
 and the culmination of the experiment at La Charrera had occurred another 64 days later.
 The notion of the hexagram year grew out of the idea of six cycles of 64 days each,
 a year of six parts, just as a hexagram has six lines.
 The personal worth of the idea was confirmed for me when I noticed that such a year of 384 days
 if begun at the time of my mother's death, would end on my own 24th birthday on the 16th of November, 1971.
 I saw then that there were cycles and cycles of cycles.
 I imagined a 384-day lunar year, and then the thing of which it was only a part,
 a cycle of 64 times 384 days, and so on.
 The maps that I constructed and the eventual quantification of them that I achieved
 is told of in the invisible landscape, but what was not told there
 was the way in which these coincidences and my unconscious mind, or something in my mind,
 would guide me to discover the properties of the I Ching.
 What to make of the ocean of resonances that the time charts seem to show,
 connecting every moment of time to every other through a scheme of connection
 that knew nothing of randomness or causality?
 And what to make of the way that the chart and the fact of my discovering it
 seem to imply that the time in which we live was the focus of an ages-long and terribly important effort?
 These were inflationary images, and I recognized them as such,
 but the power and allure of them as a form of private entertainment was frankly irresistible.
 But more important than the central role the chart assigned to the time in which we live,
 and more puzzling than its personal idiosyncratic side,
 was the fact that implicit in the structure of the chart was an end of time,
 or a period when a transition of regime would take place that would transform the modalities of reality completely.
 I was familiar with the idea of eschatologies in a religious context,
 but it had never before occurred to me that regimes in physics might undergo sudden shifts
 that would reshuffle natural laws. There is nothing against it, really.
 It is simply that science, in order to function, must assume that physical laws
 are not context-dependent on the time in which they are tested.
 If this were not so, the idea of experiment would have no meaning,
 since experiments performed at different times might then give different results.
 Yet the theory that was nightly invading my dreams during those months,
 and that I was busy elaborating nearly every waking minute,
 was a theory of unseen parameters operating in time,
 parameters symbolized by the hexagrams of the I Ching,
 but parameters that mold the possibilities offered by the laws of physics and chemistry
 into the actual realized world that is the integration of the potential possibilities
 into actual events. It is possible that, in a certain sense,
 all these states of liberation are nothing more than perfect knowledge of the contents of eternity.
 That if one knows what is contained in time, from its beginning to its end,
 you are somehow no longer in time. Even though you still have a body,
 and still eat and do what you do, you have discovered something which liberates you
 into a kind of all-at-once-ness which is very satisfying.
 There are other satisfactions that arise out of the theory
 that are not touched on in this formulation.
 Times are related to each other. Things happen for a reason,
 and the reason is not a causal reason.
 It is a reason which in physical terms is a quantum mechanical phenomenon.
 There is a wave which conditions events on all levels,
 and this wave is expressed throughout the universe on a number of extremely different discrete levels.
 It causes atoms to be atoms, and cells to be cells,
 minds to be minds, and stars to be stars.
 In a certain sense, it is a kind of physics, but it is metaphysics,
 metaphysics with mathematical rigor.
 What I propose is not a belief in the sense of a religious conviction.
 It is a scientific proposition. Anyone is welcome to dismantle it.
 This is in fact what I have attempted to do.
 [Music]
 Years after I left the Amazon, I continued to elaborate this theory
 and to clarify my own understanding of the theory-forming enterprise generally.
 I succeeded finally in 1974 in completely mathematizing the I-Ching time graphs.
 This made it possible to greatly refine the ideas of what constituted proof
 or disconfirmation of what the theory contended.
 My conclusion today on these matters is that the theory of the variable and cyclical nature
 of novelty's ingression into the world is a truly self-consistent and completely mathematical theory.
 It is true to itself. It has not been possible to find a bridge between it and normal physics.
 Such a bridge may be neither possible nor necessary.
 We may find that normal science indicates what is possible,
 while the time theory I propose offers an explanation for what is.
 It is a theory which seeks to explain how, of the things that are possible,
 some events and things undergo the formality of actually occurring.
 Therefore, the theory cannot be disproven from without.
 It can only be disproven by being found inconsistent within itself.
 Until the I-Ching graph was quantified,
 its way of integrating seemingly meaningless and unrelated factors
 made it a thing very easy to become psychologically entangled with.
 Even after the 16th of November '71 came and went with very little shift toward the novel,
 either in my life or in the world,
 I continued to propagate the cycles of the chart forward into the future,
 looking for a date that seemed to have features related to the chart
 and thus that would be a good candidate for the emergence of a special event.
 Here is a part of my story that I find most puzzling.
 After the disconfirmation of November 1971,
 I looked at other future dates on which the 384-day cycles would end
 if I continued to assume that the 16th of November '71 was the end of one such cycle.
 That meant that the next ending date of the 384-day cycle
 would be the 4th of December 1972.
 I consulted several astronomical tables, but the date seemed unpromising.
 The closing date of the next 384-day cycles was immediately more interesting
 as it fell on the 22nd of December 1973.
 I noticed this was the winter solstice.
 Here was a clue.
 The winter solstice is traditionally the time of the rebirth of the Savior Messiah.
 It is a time of pause when there is a shifting of the cosmic machinery.
 It is also the time of the transition of the sun from Sagittarius to Capricorn.
 I put no particular stock in astrology,
 but noted that Dennis is a Sagittarius and Ev a Capricorn.
 I consulted my star maps and added another coincidence,
 that where the ecliptic crosses the cusp of Sagittarius and Capricorn
 at 23 degrees Sagittarius is the very spot to within one or two degrees
 where the galactic center is presently located.
 Over 26,000 years the galactic center, like all points on the ecliptic,
 slowly moves through the signs, but now it is on the cusp of Sagittarius and Capricorn
 on the winter solstice day.
 This seemed an unusual number of coincidences, and so I pressed my search.
 Consultation with the almanac of the Naval Observatory brought a real surprise.
 On the very day that I was searching, 22 December 1973,
 a total annular eclipse of the sun would occur,
 and the path of totality would sweep directly across La Charrera and the Amazon basin.
 I was dumbfounded. I felt like a person in an eerie novel.
 This string of clues was actually real.
 I researched the eclipse to determine where exactly it would achieve totality.
 This would occur, I learned, nearly directly over the city of Belim in Brazil,
 in the delta of the Amazon River.
 This last fact carried me out of the realm of astronomical coincidence
 and back to the motifs of the trances at La Charrera.
 Belim means Bethlehem in Portuguese.
 My perception, sensitive to any messianic possibility, seized on this.
 Belim is Bethlehem. It lies at the delta of the Amazon.
 Delta, the symbol for change in time.
 Delta, in Joyce and among graffiti artists throughout history, represents the vagina.
 Dennis was born in Delta, Colorado.
 Was it possible that all of our experiences could have been a premonition
 of an event at a time and place two years hence in Brazil?
 Was this why, absurdly, at the conclusion of the experiment at La Charrera,
 the strains of a little town of Bethlehem had come echoing through my head?
 By late spring of 1972, I knew everything that I have just mentioned.
 Why did the chart point to the 22nd of December, 1973?
 And why was there such a stream of coincidences pointing to that time?
 Had I known of the impending eclipse on some unconscious level?
 Had I known it would achieve totality over Belim?
 Why did the dates important to my life line up with that date
 according to the chart I had learned to construct
 in the wake of the UFO encounter at La Charrera?
 I did not imagine that it was impossible that I had somehow known these things
 and manipulated my conscious self to imagine that it was discovering these things.
 But in the early spring of 1973, an event occurred which is the perfect proof
 that something larger than my unconscious, seemingly larger even than the total collective consciousness
 of the human race, was at work.
 This was the discovery of the comet Kohoutek,
 supposed to be the largest comet in human history,
 supposed to dwarf even Halley's comet.
 "Brightest comet ever headed toward Earth" was the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle,
 and as I scanned the article I actually let out a shout.
 The comet would make its nearest approach to the sun on the 23rd of December.
 A non-periodic comet, unknown to anyone on Earth until early March of 1973,
 was hurtling toward a rendezvous with the sun within a hundred hours of the solstice and the eclipse over the Amazon.
 It was a large coincidence, if we define that as a coincidence that deeply impresses its observer.
 It is not diminished by the fact that Kohoutek really never lived up to expectations,
 for the expectations alone were to become a wave of fringe millenarianism and apocalyptic restlessness
 that would die only as the comet itself returned to the darkness out of which it had emerged.
 Did anything happen in Baleum on the day of the eclipse?
 I do not know. I was not there.
 But I do know that the compression of events that occurred around that date,
 and the way in which the charts revealed in the UFO encounter predicted this, was uncanny.
 It was not long after that December that I realized how to completely quantify the time graph,
 and was thus led to an understanding of the way that the cycles operate,
 so that I saw the immense difficulties involved in predicting a concrescence.
 That was my last attempt. Since then I have been content to understand the theory,
 but have abandoned serious efforts to apply it specifically to predicting the course of human events.
 I do not personally doubt that the charts can and do chart the course of future novelty,
 but years of working with them leads to abandonment of the distinction between past and future,
 and preference for a kind of whole-system understanding
 that revels in the complete pattern with less stress on specific prediction.
 Was the above series of events the first intimation that I had ever had
 that something of importance was connected with a specific date in time and the city of Baleum?
 Strangely, no, it was not.
 In the spring of 1970 I was in Taipei, Taiwan,
 adjusting to city life after a long butterfly-connecting ramble through the outback of Indonesia.
 I was killing time awaiting a traveling companion who I had last seen in Bali several months before.
 I had a very peculiar dream, which occurred, though I did not know it,
 on the very day that my father and Dennis were told that my mother was dying of cancer.
 That was something I would not learn until nearly a week later.
 My journal records the following dream, 24 May 1970.
 X and I were walking up a gentle grassy slope.
 Below us on all sides the valleys were filled with scudding white clouds,
 tops brilliantly reflecting the sun back into the depthless azure.
 Ahead of us the steeply rolling hills ascended, many miles away, as I remarked,
 into the main range of the Rockies.
 We were, in dream geography, somewhere in western Colorado,
 where I was born and lived until I was 16.
 As we continued upward, Hare B., an Indonesian acquaintance,
 came to meet us wearing white tennis shorts
 and drew our attention to several small meteorological balloons
 whose dangling nylon cords had fouled in nearby wind-bent trees.
 And to our left, upon a crest, deeply dimpled, blazing white,
 and perhaps 30 feet high, was a large balloon, perhaps three-quarters filled with gas.
 The ropes enclosing the gas bag cut deeply into it,
 sectioning it as though it were a great bleached orange.
 As we gazed, Hare B. depressed a lever that had appeared from somewhere,
 and the apparatus rose simultaneously with my query,
 "Would not the wind whipping over the hill cause it to falter?"
 Its white bulk rushed over us, perhaps only 20 feet above our heads,
 and then, passing higher, it met the wind and the fate I had anticipated.
 Turning on its side, it gently came to earth.
 We ran toward it, and other people, the impression was of children,
 appeared from the opposite direction, also running toward the rippling white
 of the now-deflated machine.
 Amid our laughing examination of the balloon,
 we were invited into B's house, now visible as a sprawling, ranch-style house nearby,
 a house not unlike the house in which I spent my childhood.
 As we entered the house, I paused to examine a large map of the Amazon Delta on the wall.
 "Published," the legend informed me,
 "to commemorate a conference of a French archaeological society,
 which convened on a small island there in 1948."
 When I rejoined X, she informed me that the children of B
 had told her that one of the densest rainforests in the world was nearby.
 I, familiar as only a native can be with Colorado geography, was incredulous.
 I returned to the bookcase under the map,
 and taking out a large atlas, sought the rainfall and forest map of Colorado,
 opening instead upon Assam,
 not without first rejecting a topological rendering of Bengal.
 I heard myself say that Chalmer was the logical jumping-off place.
 Then all faded.
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