Chapter 19, The Hawaiian Connection.
 The fall of 1975 was a time of personal change
 and consolidation.
 Cat, my old friend, met years before in Jerusalem
 during my opium and Kabbalah phase,
 became at last my lover.
 Tidepool traveler, the mushroom had made good its promise
 to send a partner to share the ongoing journey
 through the interior world.
 In October, we went to Hawaii to write and to plan a trip
 to the Peruvian Amazon in early '76.
 We had rented a house on the remote and desolate
 Kau district of the big island of Hawaii.
 It was an area of twisted lava flows of all ages.
 Kapukas, islanded areas of ancient forest,
 were the only vegetation and were surrounded
 by frothy seas of hardened rock that
 had killed all low-lying and less fortunate life.
 Slowly, nearly imperceptibly, Mauna Loa
 rose up to 14,000 feet in the distance behind us.
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 We were at about 2,500 feet ourselves.
 Our small house fronted the vast and forbidding cinder fields,
 but the lot ran back into a Kapuka
 whose enclosing shade and many birds and insects
 provided welcome contrast to the primal devastation that
 stretched in all directions for miles.
 Our life was leisurely.
 I wrote and did some experiments with further aspects
 of mushroom cultivation.
 Kat was immersed in doing the line drawings for the book
 on Stropharia cubensis growing.
 We were isolated as we both love to be,
 and we took mushrooms together and often.
 It was during that time in Hawaii
 that I determined to return again to the Amazon
 to track down Banisteriopsis capi in its native setting
 and to satisfy myself as to the role
 that it and the beta-carboline hallucinogens it contains
 played in the experience at La Charrera.
 I was especially interested to know
 if other chemically different aboriginal hallucinogens
 provoked the same experience as did the mushroom psilocybin.
 I wanted to determine if our experiences were
 part of the general phenomenology of hallucinogens
 or were unique to psilocybin.
 Throughout that October and November in Hawaii,
 we took the Stropharia that we had grown
 at weekly or 10-day intervals.
 This was an amazing series of experiences.
 The psilocybin definitely conveys the impression
 that sometimes the hallucinations one is seeing
 are being seen with equal clarity
 by the other people around one.
 Cat and I satisfied ourselves that this was true
 by describing in turn the images in which we were immersed.
 At those times when the flow of images
 had a certain electric intensity,
 there was no doubt that we were seeing the same things.
 The relationship of the psyche to the surface of the body,
 the skin, is amazing under the influence of psilocybin.
 By having large areas of skin in contact,
 we seem to somehow obviate the usual psychic individuality
 and integrity of the body
 and would melt into each other's minds
 in a way that was immensely pleasant
 and full of unplumbed potential for human growth
 and parapsychological studies.
 It was wonderful to have someone to share the mushroom with
 for until Cat had joined me,
 most of my mushroom experiences had been entirely alone,
 one soul adrift in the cosmic ocean.
 Happily, there were now two of us navigating together
 through the billows of jeweled and synesthesic geometries.
 Two of those mushroom trips stand out as especially memorable.
 The first occurred the evening of the 28th of November, 1975.
 We ate five dried grams of stropharia
 and then sat inside by the fire,
 watching the slow upwelling of hallucinations
 from behind closed eyelids.
 I seemed to see fleeting but prophetic images
 of the trip that we were planning into the Amazon.
 Campfires and trails filled my head
 and the sound of nearby crickets
 seemed transformed into the roar of night jungle sounds
 that awaited us in Peru.
 We talked together of our plans and our future.
 The future seemed enormous and open before us.
 It was in that evening that we both became committed
 to a family and a life together.
 It was a large turning point for me, I have no doubt.
 We walked together outside and stood beneath the stars
 near the sheds and gardens where we daily pursued
 the yet more perfect cultivation of the mushroom.
 The night was uncannily still and the sky blazing with stars.
 Looking to the southern sky, I thought,
 if you are out there,
 if you approve the course we have set our lives on,
 if the mystery is real, then give a sign.
 I stepped toward Kat, who was walking in front of me,
 to say, I ask them for a sign.
 But before I could speak, the sky was rent
 from mid-heaven to horizon
 with a crimson streak of meteoric fire.
 The depth of attunement of psyche and world
 must be very great for such synchronisms to occur.
 Such meteor burns occur but once in all time,
 came the mushroom's comment, clear and unbidden into my mind.
 We sat down then on the warm, receptive earth
 and abandoned ourselves to the waves of vision
 and the vistas.
 At one point, a revolving night wind whipped the leaves
 of the otherwise perfectly still trees.
 The district was a remote one,
 but born on the still air over miles and miles
 from neighbors and ranches scattered far,
 we could hear the mournful howl of every dog
 in that whole part of the island.
 For hours, they moaned and howled
 in eerie, wavering u-ulation.
 We could not imagine what it meant,
 but took it as a coincidence as inexplicable
 as the sky sign on our future.
 Hours later in the time of the false dawn
 and at 4.49 local time,
 according to seismic instruments scattered around the planet,
 the earthquake struck.
 A low grinding roar moving through the lava field,
 stretching for miles all around and beneath us.
 Tidal waves and volcanic activity at Kilauea
 near the epicenter and 30 miles away from us
 followed fast on the first shock.
 An hour later, another smaller shock wave would occur.
 Now the reason for the hours of howling
 were starkly explained.
 So it is a fact that meteoric signs and a great earthquake,
 the most intense in Hawaii in a hundred years,
 attended our mushroom trip and our intensified exploration
 of the Psilocybin depths just as we attended them.
 The second and in many ways
 more puzzling major mushroom experience
 that we shared in Hawaii
 brought to an end any further exploration
 of mushroom Psilocybin
 until after our return from the Peruvian Amazon.
 It was the 23rd of December,
 a day before Dennis would arrive
 to spend the Christmas holidays with us.
 Kat and I each again took five grams
 and settled down before the fireplace
 to await the first wave of images.
 Soon we were deep out into it.
 The mushroom was showing me a watery blue-green planet
 with no land except a globe girdling archipelago
 at the equator, a kind of super Indonesia.
 Accompanying the views of the planet was a narration
 explaining that this oxygen rich world
 was within 100 light years of earth
 and was totally uninhabited by higher animals.
 As the implications of this last bit of data came home,
 I felt a wave of acquisitiveness
 that seemed to come right out of my primate roots
 and a million years of nomadism
 and restless swelling of human populations.
 The narration was explaining
 that when the symbiotic fusion of humanity
 and the Stropharia was completed,
 man would be free to claim many such planets
 for the Strophariad.
 The narration had become personified into the inner voice
 that attends the mushroom trance,
 and with it I began a discussion
 of the view of the watery planet
 and the technology such views implied.
 I wondered after the technology of star travel
 and whether the mushroom,
 for all the extravagant images it is able to bestow,
 could produce any effect in the normal continuum.
 I had the idea that we should go outside,
 as we usually did at some point in our trips,
 and had a vague intimation
 that we might see some continuation
 of the cloud-related phenomena
 that had been a part of the experience at La Charrera.
 Cat complained of being very hot
 and agreed we should go outdoors.
 We were very unsteady on our feet,
 and though Cat said very little,
 I felt considerable alarm for her,
 even though when she said that she was hot,
 I assumed that going outdoors
 would be sufficient to cool her off.
 Outside, we stood unsteadily in the front yard.
 The night was overcast.
 Cat seemed to be lapsing in and out of consciousness.
 It was becoming harder and harder to rouse her.
 She kept saying that they were burning her,
 but that she thought she could hold them back.
 Finally, she collapsed altogether,
 and I could not get any response.
 My first thought was to realize how isolated we were
 and how impossible it would be
 to get any sort of outside help.
 It would take hours to get anyone there,
 and doubtless, there was no one who knew more than we did
 about psilocybin on the entire island.
 Besides, the overwhelming gestalt of the situation
 was somehow that we had been placed by something
 in the scales of life and death,
 and that whatever was to be done,
 it was to be done by us alone
 and in the next very few minutes.
 I remembered then that at the back of the house,
 near where we were accustomed to taking sunbaths,
 there was a large tub of water
 that held the overflow from our catchment system.
 It required, even in the face of a mortal threat,
 which I recognized this to be,
 a complete organization of my consciousness
 to think of emptying the water over Kat.
 But as soon as I thought of it,
 it seemed to give the swirling world a direction.
 I picked her up in a single sweeping motion
 and carried her, us lurching through the dark,
 past the spiky palm, fantastic in the darkness.
 I laid her on the ground
 and began to empty can after can
 of clear black and silver silken water
 over every inch of her.
 It was immediately apparent
 that we had found the limiting factor
 of whatever was making her feel a burning sensation
 and forcing her into unconsciousness.
 Tearfully and joyously embraced
 there in the water and the mud,
 both sensing that this very uncharacteristic effect
 of the mushroom had been a close call.
 As we knelt together with the realization
 that we had surmounted the difficulty
 that had risen to confront us,
 a wild peel of unearthly sound,
 a howling laughter split the air
 from the direction of the ancient wood behind the house.
 (chicken clucking)
 Neither of us mentioned it then,
 but later we agreed
 that it had been very real and unsettling.
 We stumbled back into the house
 and I made a tea while Kat talked to me
 and candidly confided that she was experiencing
 what must be like being insane.
 She described having very frank hallucinations
 with her eyes open,
 strange, tangible fern and orchid-like forms
 growing and twisting out of every available surface.
 The previous sensation of heat
 was now resolved down into a field
 of white-hot potential energy
 that could be held away from burning contact with her body
 by allowing the hallucinogenic energy
 to spend itself in a chaos of weird and explicit images.
 Only by applied concentration
 could she hold the burning plasma at bay
 a few feet away from her,
 where it became a skin of vision
 and encompassed everything else.
 After a few minutes of this,
 Kat again seemed to be fading
 and so we drew a cold bath
 and she lay in that for a while
 until the symptoms again abated.
 As we talked,
 it became apparent that her experience
 had dimensions for her
 that had not been apparent to me.
 When we had first stepped out of the house,
 she discovered that the sensation of heat
 had not diminished, but only grown stronger.
 Then she had noticed that directly above her
 was a disk of light and color,
 a giant tinker toy assemblage
 of softly glowing rods of light
 with jewel-like connectors emanating every color.
 I understood, she told me,
 that the relationships of the pieces,
 their lengths, their angles to each other,
 was infinitely complex
 and also the embodiment of perfect truth.
 By seeing it, I was understanding everything,
 but there were creatures inside the vehicle,
 mantis-like and also made of light,
 that didn't want me to know.
 Bending over their instrument panels,
 the more I understood,
 the more they burned me with their ray.
 I couldn't stop looking,
 but I was being vaporized.
 I felt you pick me up
 and as you carried me, I thought,
 I hope he hurries, I am becoming a cloud.
 For a moment, I was floating above,
 looking down at us,
 people bigger than life, out of time.
 Then I felt the water on my skin,
 redefining the limits of my body,
 condensing me again.
 - Kat's impression of the situation was
 that this was not a threat conveyed by the mushroom,
 but a force inside the continuum
 that the mushroom makes available,
 a force that is seemingly morally ambiguous.
 Kat was having a UFO close contact experience
 while I was seeing nothing.
 It was a contact fraught with danger
 and the threat of extinction.
 It had abruptly terminated
 when I had taken her back to the water.
 We sat up all night discussing what had happened.
 It served to accentuate other odd things
 that we had noticed when taking psilocybin
 in that remote environment.
 We had particularly noticed small scratchings
 and rustlings at the periphery of sense
 and vision during the trips.
 Not unlike the activation
 of a classic poltergeist phenomena,
 these small movements and noises were so regular
 a feature of these experiences
 that I came to simply accept them.
 We also noticed waves of organization
 or anti-entropic swells that seemed to sweep
 through animate and inanimate matter alike
 during the mushroom voyages.
 For instance, after a prolonged period
 of near trance and contemplation of the visions,
 if we were to draw away from it
 in a collective motion to stretch or talk,
 then the fire would suddenly flare and burn brighter
 and the rustling of the periphery increase.
 We were definitely at the brink of the same dimension
 that I had been plunged into at La Charrera,
 again brought there by the agency of the mushroom.
 This time, however, we took our threat-laden brush
 with the thing as an admonition to ease up for a time.
 We formed the determination to go to Peru
 and to take ayahuasca,
 whose chemistry and reputation might, we thought,
 be helpful in giving some perspective
 on the nature of psilocybin relative to other psychochemicals.
 Our walks in the rain forests of Hawaii
 were pale but real prefigurement of Amazon trails
 once followed in the past
 and in a few months to be traveled again.
 It was during one of those walks,
 reflecting on her UFO experience,
 that Kat pointed out that a lens is the natural result
 of the overlapping of two spheres.
 Is there more than a pun involved
 in applying this idea to the lens-shaped UFO?
 Perhaps some topological truth is implied
 in the thought that the lens is caused
 by the overlapping of one continuum with another.
 Lenticular clouds were a part of the UFO contact
 that I was caught up in at La Charrera in '71.
 This theme reemerged during those psilocybin experiences
 in the desolate landscapes of rural Hawaii.
 On yet another mushroom trip,
 when Kat and I stepped outside late at night,
 we beheld the stars through the moving interstices
 of a high lacework of thin clouds.
 Yet hovering only a few hundred feet above
 and slightly in front of us
 was a very dark, dense lenticular cloud.
 It grew more solid appearing even as we watched.
 Then suddenly this tendency was reversed
 and it began to thin and fade very quickly.
 Then it was gone.
 Years go by and there's little intrusion
 of the peculiar into things.
 Then suddenly it is with us again,
 effecting coincidence and appearing to channel
 the flow of events towards some end,
 sensed but not understood.
 The current wave of paranoid fiction,
 gravity's rainbow, Illuminatus, Ratner's star, et cetera,
 make feedback from the collective difficult to evaluate.
 Man is always a creature in transformation.
 This imparts to every moment deeply felt
 a sense of the mystery of any future unrealized.
 Is the present situation any different
 from many others in the past?
 Novelty is always in the process of emergence,
 but does it ever emerge explicitly, suddenly,
 from the events in which it is embedded,
 suddenly enough for us to recognize it
 as a true flux of the temporal continuum?
 It does, I believe, in miracles and ecstasy
 and in situations where forces are seen at work
 that are undescribed by today's physics.
 It is necessary to reiterate
 these familiar threads of thought,
 for if this is not done,
 then no record exists of whatever steps we have taken
 toward understanding psilocybin and its relation to the UFO,
 the knot of anomaly that seems to haunt time like a ghost.
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