[music] [music] Chapter 18, The Coming of the Strophariad. Such were the concerns through which I navigated the intervening years to the present. No definitive condensation of the thing we sought has yet occurred. What did occur was the continued elaboration of the theories, both of hypercarbolation and of the nature of time. In late 1975, the Invisible Landscape was published and our ideas made publicly available. But since the manuscript of that work had been nearly two years finished, we had not been idle. The conclusion of myself and my brother was that when all was said and done, the truly novel element and the candidate for being the causal element in the situation at La Charrera was the mushroom. It was Stropharia cubensis which stood behind all of the effects that we had experienced. And as this realization grew, so did the understanding that if this was the case, then new expeditions into the unimaginable could be launched only if a supply of the mushrooms could be secured. Now it happened that on that second trip to La Charrera, the mushroom had been much less abundant than the first time, and this scarcity had impelled me to take a number of spore prints from the few specimens that we did run across. Those spore prints had been kept refrigerated over the years while my brother and I pursued academic careers and wrote our book. During those intervening years, we dabbled with the thought of cultivating Stropharia cubensis, but the only work on the subject was Wasson and M's work in French, and it seemed somehow a remote and technically difficult thing to attempt. In the spring of 1972, we had already isolated the mycelium of the mushroom and had it growing on agar in Petri dishes, but it was not until the early spring of '75 that we encountered an article detailing a method for growing commercial mushrooms on rye in canning jars under very carefully controlled conditions. Perhaps this method would also work for Stropharia cubensis and get our stalled exploration of the invisible moving again. Working in close consultation with my brother in Colorado, we determined within a matter of weeks that the hardy Stropharia not only grew and fruited with the new method, but that it was less fragile and easier to grow than the agaricus species sold in grocery stores as food. The implications of all this were not lost upon us. From the spring of 1975 onward, I was not without a continual supply of Stropharia. Ev and I had parted earlier in the year. I was living alone and finishing up an academic career that had lasted far too long, what with seven years of wandering around the world scheduled in. It was a time of loneliness, self-examination, and work pressure. Into that world came suddenly the perfected method for growing the same organism that had been the means to opening up the dimension of contact four years before. The very spores gathered at La Charrera were now furiously producing mushroom psilocybin in my home. During the spring, I experimented with low dosages several times. The sense of peace and lightness that I associated with the halcyon days at La Charrera was definitely there. So too was the sense of a teaching voice and a return to close consultation with a cosmic agency of complex intent. Throughout the spring and summer of that year, I took the mushroom at doses of five grams dried or fifty grams fresh as often as I felt was prudent, which worked out to about once every two weeks. Each of these experiences was a lesson, a chilling and exhilarating plunge into an ocean of noetic images. I discovered my own mind like a topological manifold lying before me, inviting me to rove and scan the reflective knot of past and future time that I am. Alien presences and translinguistic elves bent near to me in those trances. The mushroom stressed its age, its vast knowledge of the ebb and flow of historical forces in many civilizations with which it had been associated through the millennia. Images of the past and future abounded. Once I found myself on a hill with a crowd of people. The view looked out over a curved plain. It was the interior of a cylindrical space colony, miles in extent. Vast sweeps of windows alternated with farmlands and towns scattered along the floors of the valleys between each set of windows. I knew somehow that in the future I was seeing hundreds of millions of people lived in such cylindrical worlds. The teeming worlds that populate the galaxy in the minds of our science fiction writers had been recreated inside a sphere only twelve light hours in diameter and with the sun at its center. Within that sphere, thousands of independent societies pursued their destinies and their evolution, thousands of independent cylinder worlds swarming around the infinite energy furnace of the sun. What a rich and endlessly creative force humanity had become in escaping the confines of the planet. Through the vast windows I could see more advanced machinery being made ready. A starship. It was the departure of an experimental starship. Copland's fanfare for the common man was being played. [Music] Again I saw eternity futures where the knowledge of the mushroom was not fused with humanity's restless expansionism. I saw a planet covered with a society of slave-worker machine symbiotes. I saw the life of North American society running through several hundred years of upheaval and political change, an image like a great animated war planning board. The dualism of fascism and democracy hung around America's neck like the albatross. Again and again, nightmare police state fascism would sweep like a foul tide over the aspirations of the people, and again and again the subtlety of the people would organize around the stupidity of the oppressor and rise in wild and bloody revolt to again secure the space of a few generations in which to inaugurate attempts at democratic social justice. The mushroom always returned to the theme that it was wiser in the ways of evolution and sympathetic therefore to a symbiotic union of the technical control of matter possessed by humanity and its own sense of the howness of things that had been developed over millions of years of conscious experience as an intelligent organism radiating through the galaxy. From its own point of view it is an elder life form, and as such it offers its tempering experience to a vibrant but naive child race that stands for the first time on the brink of the stars. As our imagination has striven outward to attempt to encompass the possibility of the intelligent other somewhere in the starry galaxy, so the other, observing this, now reveals itself to be among us as an aspect of ourselves when in the psilocybin trance. In the phenomenon of Stropharocubensis we are confronted with an intelligent and seemingly alien life form, not as we commonly imagine it, but an intelligent alien life form nevertheless. It is only an anachronistic lack of modern self-reflection that would lead any thinker on the subject of extraterrestrial life to suppose that any intelligent alien would be even remotely like ourselves. Evolution is an unceasing river of forms and adaptive solutions to special conditions, culture even more so. It is far more likely that an alien intelligence would be barely cognizable to us as such, rather than that it should overwhelm us with such similarities as anthropoid form and an intimate knowledge of our gross industrial capacity. Star-traveling species would have a sophisticated knowledge of genetics and DNA function, and therefore would not necessarily bear the form which evolution on a native planet had given them. They might well look as they wished to look. In the late summer of 1975, Dennis and I decided that the world we were exploring required a wider audience so that some consensus concerning what was going on could be established. To that end, we wrote and published a guide on the method we had developed to cultivate the Strepharia. At the beginning of that little book, I introduced what we had personally learned about the world of the mushroom. The mushroom speaks, and our opinions rest upon what it tells eloquently of itself in the cool night of the mind. I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than your history. Though I have been on earth for ages, I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disk of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sunbathing. My true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections than the number in a human brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal. Only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out. By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality, all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyper-like communication across space and time. The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider's web, but the collective hyper-mind and memory is a vast historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across the eons of time and space drifted many spore-bearing life forms in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a suitable environment. Few such species are minded. Only myself and my recently evolved near relatives have achieved the hyper-communication mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members of the community of galactic intelligence. How the hyper-communication mode operates is a secret that will not be given lightly to humanity, but the means should be obvious. It is the occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and my symbiotes the vision screens to many worlds. You as an individual and mankind as a species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic relationship with my genetic material that will eventually carry humanity and Earth into the galactic mainstream of the higher civilizations. Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you, your most advanced theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. But beyond the cohesion of the members of the species into a single social organism, there lie richer and even more baroque illusionary possibilities. Symbiosis is one of these. Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for both of the species involved. Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized forms of higher animals have been established many times and in many places throughout the long ages of my development. These relationships have been mutually useful. Within my memory is the knowledge of hyperlight driveships and how to build them. I will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns less forsaken and nearer galaxy center. To secure an eternal existence down the long river of cosmic time, I again and again offer this agreement to higher beings and thereby have spread throughout the galaxy over the long millennia. A mycelial network has no organs to move the world, no hands. But higher animals with manipulative abilities can become partners with the star knowledge within me. And if they act in good faith, return both themselves and their humble mushroom teacher to the minion worlds all citizens of our star swarm are heir to. [water bubbling] What has been my own reaction to the mushrooms claims concerning the extraterrestrial origins of tryptamine hallucinogens and the visions they bear? I am of many minds. I think that it is possible that certain of these compounds could be seeded genes injected into the planetary ecology eons ago by an automated space probe arriving here from a civilization somewhere else in the galaxy. Such genes could have been carried along in the genome of a mushroom or other plant awaiting only the advent of another intelligence and its discovery of them to begin reading out a message that opens with the bizarre dimension familiar to shaman everywhere. The point of such a message could only be made clear when we had advanced to a sufficient level of technical achievement to appreciate it. The exponential growth of analytical tools and methods may indicate that we are now approaching such a level. I speculate that the final content of the message and its raison d'etre will be instructions (it will be called a discovery) of how to build a matter transmitter or subspace radio so that we can have direct contact with the civilization that sent the message-bearing hallucinogen genes to the Earth so many eons ago. The trances imply that such a civilization has a faster-than-light technology for information if not for matter itself, but they require a receiver at the arrival point, else they are as bound by the constraints of general relativity as are we. The mushroom alien may have seeded the stars with automatic biomechanical probes immensely sophisticated by our standards, able to tailor-make message-bearing hallucinogens for the special ecological conditions that the probe may encounter, and to release virus-like pseudo-organisms that can carry the artificial genes into the nucleoplasm of the target species. This is a far more enduring form of message than a solid-state monolith on the moon or an orbiting monitor. The artificial genes may be carried along in the stream of evolution for literally hundreds of millions of years without substantial degradation of the message. The information carried by the probe and broadcast by the hallucinogens is modulated by the modalities of the evolving intelligence of whatever planet is contacted, and slowly the emphasis of the information available from the probe shifts. Predictions of good hunting, finding of lost objects, and the provision of medical advice is slowly superseded by the revelation of the extraterrestrial source of this information and the telos behind it, the star antenna and the entry into the hegemony of the galactic civilization that it will bring with it. Speculative ideas indeed, but strangely enough, many of the most current calculations and ideas about the density of life and intelligence in the galaxy confront xenobiologists with the dilemma of why we have not been contacted. I will not go into details, but Ponampurama and Cameron's scientific perspectives on extraterrestrial communication gives an excellent overview of current thinking on the subject. R. N. Bracewell's contribution printed in the same work was the basis of my own ideas about interstellar probes. I will summarize the state of the art thus. Current thinking concludes that the peak of the emergence of intelligence in the galaxy was achieved 10 to 100 million years ago, that most races in the galaxy are very old and very sophisticated. We cannot expect such races to appear with a trumpet blast over every city on Earth. Such an entry into history is tantamount to crashing into someone's house completely unannounced, hardly the sort of thing that one would expect from a subtle and ancient galactic civilization. Rather, they have always been here, or rather, their presence has always been here in the Hallucinogens. When we understand this on our own, we will be signaling to them that we are now ready for the contact. We can send that signal only by following the instructions of the seeded genes and building the necessary apparatus. When that is done, somewhere in the galaxy, lights will flash the message that yet another of the millions upon millions of seeded planets in the galaxy has achieved the threshold of galactic citizenship. Current estimates are that even in a galaxy teeming with intelligence, such a threshold is passed by an intelligent species only every hundred or thousand years. It is a joyous moment even for the Galactarians. If such a speculation has any validity at all, then its very articulation signifies the final moment of the pre-contact phase and signifies also the pressing need to attempt to explore the Psilocybin Trance and to understand the role that Stropharia cubensis is playing in the psychology of the human species. Recently a new light has been thrown on the phenomenon of voices heard in the head and the role that they may play in the evolution of consciousness. Julian Jaynes of Princeton has written a most provocative book, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." Jaynes uses 445 pages to lay out his ideas concerning the role that hallucinations especially audial hallucinations have played in the structuring of mind. Briefly, Jaynes believes that until the time of roughly the Iliad, around 1400 BC, nothing at all like modern ego-centered and individuated consciousness existed. Instead, he argues that people behaved like automata or social insects, unconsciously going about the tasks of the hive. Only in moments of great stress and personal danger was this regimen broken. In such moments an impersonal mind, outside the usual experience of the world, became manifest as a voice. According to Jaynes' theory, such voices were the guiding lights of human society, perhaps for millennia, whether they were understood to be the voice of an absent but living king, or a dead king, an omnipresent god, or a personal deity. Migrations and the breakdown of the cultural insularity of the early human civilizations brought an end to man's relations to the bicameral mind, which is Jaynes' term for the cybernetic god-like presence felt behind the hallucinated voices. Selective pressures and social prejudices against having a relationship with the bicameral mind in a modern context have made hearing voices into a mystical phenomenon or a serious mental aberration, in any case something very rare. The interested reader should study Jaynes' case carefully, although his book is exasperating, since in a treatise on the role of hallucinations in human history, he fails to offer any serious discussion of hallucinogenic plant use at all. This is a serious failing, especially if the effect triggered by psilocybin is not, as I have suggested, a contact with an intelligence entirely distinct from ourselves. Jaynes' theory opens up the possibility that psilocybin returns one to rapport with the personified other in a way that duplicates on some level the state of mind that was characteristic of early human civilizations. It is reasonable to suggest that a voice in the head, interpreted by ancient man as a god, might be interpreted by a naive modern person as a telepathic contact with extraterrestrials. Whatever facts may eventually be known, psilocybin offers a tool that allows direct experience of this voice that explains all things, this logos of the other. [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] [Water sounds] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.65 sec Decoding : 2.55 sec Transcribe: 1827.70 sec Total Time: 1830.90 sec